In the closing pages of Weak Strongman, Timothy Frye (Reference Frye2021, 197) writes that “Putin’s twenty years in power and the prospect of many more on the horizon have led to a strong bout of Putin fatigue among the mass [Russian] public.” Judging by the number of books produced on Vladimir Putin and Putinism over the last two decades, specialists of post-communist Russian politics do not share this sentiment. The burgeoning literature on Putiniana ranges widely, from works like Frye’s Weak Strongman and Henry Hale’s Patronal Politics (Reference Hale2014), both of which locate the Putin phenomenon in comparative studies of personalist autocracies, to analyses of Putin’s rule that are more tightly focused on Russia. The legion of books in the latter category offers a variety of frames for understanding Russia under Putin, from kleptocracy (Dawisha Reference Dawisha2014) and KGB/FSB dominance (Belton Reference Belton2020) to intra-elite struggle (Zygar Reference Zygar2016). Where some of these books are intent on explaining the logic and dynamics of Putin’s leadership, such as Brian Taylor’s The Code of Putinism (Reference Taylor2018), others are focused on the strategies of legitimation that have allowed Putin to maintain not just his hold on power but impressive public support through several electoral and economic cycles.

An especially compelling work that unravels the puzzle of Putin’s continuing popularity is Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity. How does one explain, Sharafutdinova asks, “that the degree of genuine support for Putin in Russian society goes beyond the fact that people find themselves choosing in the absence of alternatives” (ix). For her, the answer lies in an ingenious strategy of regime legitimation that constructs a collective national identity binding Putin to the people at a deep psychological level.Footnote ¹ This legitimation project, launched in earnest after 2011, supersedes earlier attempts to introduce a formal state ideology whose development occupied presidential advisers from 1996 through Surkov’s experiment with “sovereign democracy” in the early Putin years.

In producing a work of political science that draws generously from the literature on social psychology, Sharafutdinova does not seek to compete with the sweeping assessments of the Putin era found in many of the works in the Putiniana genre. Instead, she explores in depth a single dimension of the Putin phenomenon: manipulation of collective identity politics, especially in the years from 2014 to 2018, when economic performance no longer allowed the regime to satisfy readily the material interests of its citizens. For Sharafutdinova, who grew up in Russia but received her higher education in the West, the puzzle surrounding the sources of legitimation of the Putin regime has a deeply personal resonance. As she explains in the introduction, she has been trying to understand why friends and classmates who had a similar upbringing to her own had developed into firm supporters of Putin’s leadership. Writing as both insider and outsider, she employs a rich and varied methodology that relies not just on the social science literature, extensive interviews with focus groups, and national surveys—one of which she developed—but also, and most innovatively, on works of cultural production in areas as diverse as poetry and film.

Sharafutdinova argues that three factors came together to produce the successful legitimation strategy that has kept Putin in power. The first is an element of the Soviet inheritance. Although she is unconvinced by assertions that homo sovieticus is still alive and well—or has been revived—in contemporary Russia, she embraces the idea that there is a cognitive legacy from the Soviet era. This legacy predisposes Russian citizens to look with particular favor on official narratives that exploit sentiments of public anxiety and belligerent defensiveness as well as long-held beliefs in national exceptionalism, national vulnerability, and the inevitability of conflict. Such “cognitive structures constructed during the Soviet era,” she insists, “play an important role in consolidating political support for Vladimir Putin’s leadership, policies, and the political system built under his rule” (60).

In order to exploit the anxieties and assumptions infusing these “shared mental models” (61), Putin and his acolytes formed the raw material of recent Russian history into a narrative that corresponds to what social psychologists call chosen trauma. That raw material comes primarily from the 1990s, the period between communism’s collapse and Putin’s ascent to power. In the view of the Putin leadership, the likhye 1990-e (wild and woolly 1990s) represented the nadir of Russian power and dignity, a Time of Troubles that stands in stark contrast to moments of what social psychologists call chosen glory, such as World War II and the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It was in the 1990s that Russia experienced not only an economic collapse at home and a rapid descent from power abroad but also a crisis of values and identity.

This dystopian image of the wild and woolly 1990s—the second component of Putin’s legitimation strategy—remains to this day a trope that Putin and those around him employ with regularity to explain the shortcomings of the moment and the need for strong and ever vigilant leadership, much as the Bolsheviks in their day relied on perezhitki (vestiges) from the capitalist past as an excuse for the failures—and the harsh measures—of the communist regime. As recently as late June 2021, Mikhail Murashko, Putin’s minister of health, blamed the Russian population’s reluctance to get the Coronavirus vaccine on the excessive “freedom of morals and personal opinions carried over from the 1990s” (Nuzhno chto-to meniat vremia, 29 June). Thus, more than two decades after this era of chosen trauma, Russian leaders continue to use the specter of the 1990s as a cautionary tale designed to legitimize Putin and his method of rule.Footnote ² Maintaining this perception of the 1990s as an ongoing threat requires both constant reminders of the evils of the era and the dismissal—or at least the downplaying—of other potential candidates for periods of chosen trauma, from the Stalin era and the years of stagnation under Brezhnev to the current economic and health crises occasioned by the Coronavirus.

The third pillar of Putin’s legitimation strategy rests on a portrayal of Putin as the only viable antidote to forces that would pull Russian back toward the abyss of the troubled 1990s. Putin serves to inoculate Russia against this fate in two ways. First, he provides the strong hand that guarantees the integrity and governability of the far-flung and potentially fissiparous Russian state, whose very existence was in doubt in the 1990s, at least according to the Cassandras. Secondly, during his last two terms, Putin has championed policies that he insists are designed to reverse the moral and spiritual decline of Russia in the 1990s. Putin rejects Gorbachev’s image of Russia as a member of a common European home, instead portraying his country as the morally superior maverick intent on defending itself against the spread of the decadence and depravity that infuse modern Western life. Sharafutdinova quotes long-time political consultant for Putin, Gleb Pavlovsky, who observed that Putin and those around him used “the language of the average person” to make “people believe in Russia” again (12). She explains that Putin did so in part by holding Russia up as an exemplar for a fallen West and by cultivating a pride in Russia that serves as a salve for the “wounded, insecure identity” (24) associated with the shame of the 1990s.

It is not enough, however, to craft the raw material of history into a potent narrative that has the potential to resonate with the public. There must also be a mechanism for communicating that message convincingly on a mass scale. And so, approximately two-thirds of the way through the book, Sharafutdinova shifts the focus of the work from the ideational structures undergirding Putin’s collective identity project to the agents who disseminate the message through varied channels of mass communication. In this section, she explores the ways that prominent personalities and political technologists manage the outrage industry, which uses “agitainment” (151) and similar media products to create a suffocating social consensus, or “mass common sense” (27). Central to this manipulation of public opinion has been the demonization of cultural and political enemies, from Pussy Riot to the “fascist junta in Kyiv” (148), and the glorification of Putin as national leader, a concept that goes well beyond the title of elected president.

Harnessing popular outrage was of course a perennial feature of Soviet politics, with the bureaucracy, corruption, and red tape (volokita) serving as traditional objects of scorn and derision for the official media. Although individual bureaucrats still come in for their share of criticism from the authorities, officialdom no longer represents the whipping boy that it was in earlier decades, whether because of a recognition of the popular cynicism surrounding periodic anticorruption campaigns or a desire to avoid undermining confidence in the state itself. Instead of targeting the powerful, the Putin leadership has created domestic enemies out of the marginalized, such as the LGBTQ community.

As the experience with anticorruption drives demonstrates, no legitimating device can last forever. Deepening economic crisis, fading memories of the period of chosen trauma, and the inevitable physical decline and demise of the leader, among other factors, will, at some point, begin to undermine the seemingly impregnable pillars of the current regime. One suspects, however, that tapping into an insecure collective identity as a mobilizing strategy produces a deeper resonance and a longer shelf life than will campaigns against greedy officials, in part, as Sharafutdinova argues, because the former helps to knit together a community.

What kind of community this strategy creates is another matter. Sharafutdinova insists in the epilogue that whatever else an emphasis on victimhood and revanche accomplishes, it “is not the glue that could enable Russia’s economic, social, and cultural revival” (176). Vyacheslav Volodin has argued that Russia cannot survive without Putin [“nyet Putina, nyet Rossii”], but as Sharafutdinova illustrates convincingly in The Red Mirror, Russia cannot flourish with him.