Andrei Kolesnikov is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. His research focuses on the major trends shaping Russian domestic politics, with particular focus on ideological shifts inside Russian society.
Kolesnikov is also a member of the scientific advisory council of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) and a senior research associate fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI).
Before joining Carnegie in 2015, Kolesnikov worked for a number of leading Russian publications. He previously was the managing editor of Novaya Gazeta newspaper and served as deputy editor in chief of Izvestia and The New Times.
He has won numerous journalism awards, including the Russian Golden Quill (Zolotoye Pero Rossii) Award, the Adam Smith Prize, and the 2021 Yegor Gaidar Award for outstanding contribution to the study of history.
Kolesnikov is author of several books, including a biography of the Russian reformer Yegor Gaidar.
The regime is driven by ideas of supremacy and messianism, nationalism and imperialism. In this respect, there is no difference between Putin and his inner circle and Prigozhin.
However murky and ill conceived, Prigozhin’s mutiny did manage to do one critical thing: it poked a hole in the Kremlin’s campaign to assure Russians that everything is fine — that the economy is booming, the military is focused on winning, and the war in Ukraine won’t come for them.
Andrei Kolesnikov reflects on the current state of the Putin regime, the Russian elite, and systemic liberals in government, as well as the possibility of civil war in Russia. In his opinion, the prevailing scenario in post-Putin Russia will be an exceedingly difficult, but relatively peaceful transition to normalcy.
In the current political system, Prigozhin can only be against the elite so long as he is for Putin. It would take the slightest sign from the president for the Wagner boss to disappear.
President Putin revived Stalinist anti-Americanism to justify a botched war. No longer is Russia simply bringing to heel a weak Ukraine that has fallen under the spell of “neo-Nazis.” Russia’s real fight is against the mighty United States, which wants to destroy it, while Ukraine is merely an obedient U.S. satellite.
Russia’s totalitarian turn has driven a surge in sales of George Orwell’s 1984, as well as books focusing on Nazi Germany, especially those exploring social transformations of the 1930s and mass behavior during the war. With public protest of any kind now illegal in Russia, reading has also become a form of resistance.
Weariness of the “special military operation” in Russia is expressed not only in calls for peace, but also in either more aggressive or more passive, incurable support for the authorities.
The inherent submission of the Russian people to their political leadership has its roots in fear, generational trauma, and extreme socioeconomic dependency on the state.
One of the key sociopolitical problems of Russian society is that seventy-year-old political leaders are deciding for young people how they will live and what they will die for.
