Twenty-five years ago this week, Russia’s first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, formally handed over power to a hand-picked successor. “Take care of Russia,” was Yeltsin’s final exhortation to the young Vladimir Putin, who had been selected by a clique of oligarchs as a safe pair of hands who would protect their interests.

Today, those oligarchs are long gone, but Putin remains. The Russia that he has created has, in many ways, changed unrecognisably over the last generation.

Today’s Russia finds itself isolated from the West, cut off from international flights and banking systems, their President wanted by the International Criminal Court, Nato massively expanded along its borders, the capital under concerted attack from Ukrainian drones, and until very recently part of its territory occupied by a foreign army supplied with American weapons. 

Boris Yeltsin stands with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2000 (Photo: Itar Tass)

In other ways, though, Putin’s Russia is all too familiar to earlier, Soviet generations — and never more so than on the 9 May Victory Day. The 80th-anniversary celebrations of the USSR’s defeat of Nazism featured serried ranks of tanks and rockets, goose-stepping troops parading on Moscow’s Red Square, buildings draped in scarlet banners featuring Hero of the Soviet Union medals and great Soviet generals.

The North Korean officers that Putin personally congratulated for their role in helping to liberate Kursk from invading Ukrainians wore uniforms and medals of late Soviet cut, while the Russian officers harked back to an earlier tradition of high-collared tunics favoured by Marshal Zhukov’s wartime generation.

Under Yeltsin, Victory Day was a commemoration of victory over fascism in the Second World War, and a celebration of the wartime alliance that made that victory possible. Bill Clinton even attended in 1995. But today’s Victory Day is no longer solely about the past but rather stands as a symbol of Putin’s vision for the future.

Troops from China, North Korea, Vietnam and Kazakhstan — countries with little historical connection to the Great Patriotic War — marched in Moscow alongside their Russian comrades. And on the podium, Putin sat alongside Russia’s most important partner — or some might say new economic overlord — China’s Xi Jinping.

Under Putin, Victory Day has become a display of unity among autocratic regimes, still loyal to their Communist heritage and bound by a shared defiance of the democratic Western world and its values.

Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missile system launchers roll during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9 (Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

In Russia’s case, this new order is underpinned by a militaristic and ultranationalist ancestor cult. Putin has appropriated the memory of a war that forms the lived experience of only a tiny handful of centenarians and made it the heart of his own regime’s legitimacy.

Yet the Soviet Union, for all its social conservatism, was paradoxically founded on the embrace of the future. It was, ostensibly, a state that demanded sacrifices of its people in the name of a bright, collective, communist world to come.

But the tropes revived to underpin Putin’s kleptocratic autocracy — from Tsarist-era nationalism to the cult of the Great Patriotic War — have only a limited appeal to a new generation of atheistic, net-savvy, naturally capitalist and inter-connected young Russians.

Unlike China or the USSR, Russia has no highly developed government and party structure, no powerful and long-established state ideology of collective prosperity, and no towering achievements in space exploration or world-aweing urban and technological development to unite behind.

Putin greets participants of a military parade on Victory Day on May 9 (Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/ Reuters)

But while the great parade may be a mere symbol and spectacle, many of the more sinister elements of Soviet life have returned with very real menace.

Modern Russians, like their grandparents, must watch what they say and face imprisonment for disagreeing with the Party line — for instance, by calling the Ukraine invasion a war instead of a “special military operation.”

Television is once again pure propaganda, and thousands of Russian dissidents try to rebuild their lives in exile in the West.

Do ordinary Russians truly believe the Kremlin’s messaging that Kyiv is run by liberal Fascists and that Putin is saving them from a hostile takeover by the West?

“The Russian people have always been spectators of their country’s politics,” observes the poet and critic Dmitry Bykov — in exile in the US since being labelled a “foreign agent” by the Russian state in 2022.

“It’s like a theatre … today’s Russian does what is expected of him. Sometimes he applauds, sometimes he wolf-whistles. But he is not required to actually believe.

“Everyone knows that the man on the stage is not Prince Hamlet but Laurence Olivier. Nobody believes that what is happening on the stage is actually true. But [after the Ukraine invasion], the theatre is coming more like a circus. The people are not stupid. They watch and laugh nervously and see how low the actors will go.”

Putin himself believes that he is the saviour of his country. Asked recently by the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg whether he had looked after Russia as Yeltsin had once exhorted him, Putin’s reply was defiant. “I have not only looked after Russia but rather we have pulled back from the brink of an abyss,” said Putin at his annual press conference last December. “We were heading to a total loss of sovereignty, and without sovereignty, Russia cannot exist as an independent state.”

A damaged apartment building following the drone attack in Moscow in March (Photo: Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP)

Putin did not explain who he believed was threatening Russia, how, or why. For most of his quarter-century in power Western countries have been all too happy to make money in partnership with Russia, either by selling its people goods and services or, in the case of Germany, building an entire economic model based on reliable supplies of cheap Russian natural gas.

Until, of course, Putin crashed those economic ties when he decided to try to effect regime change in Kyiv. And for the whole period of Putin’s ascendancy everything about Russia — from Putin’s rising great power fantasies to the famous stability of his regime — has been underpinned by high world oil prices, an economic factor that had nothing to do with the Kremlin and was entirely outside its control.

Yeltsin headed a Russian state that was bankrupt as long as oil was trading at just $12 (£9) a barrel. Under Putin, the price rose past $100 (£75) – and both his own billionaire cronies and ordinary Russians reaped the benefits of that long cycle of prosperity.

Now, though, oil prices are falling back towards 1990s levels, and Russia’s war and sanctions-strained economy is starting to creak at the seams.

Both Putin and his entire nation have become hostages to a profoundly miscalculated war that the Kremlin believed would be over in three days but has now cost close to a million Russian casualties. Putin has exploited a deep vein of Russian nationalism that existed before he came to power.

But there is no such thing as Putinism — only a chimerical mixture of religious ethno-nationalism, a paranoiac, millenarian fear of foreign interference, and kleptocracy. Not only will Putin leave no lasting ideological legacy, but any legacy of prosperity and stability that he may have created has been destroyed by his own decision to wage war on Ukraine.

He has gained a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, at a terrible cost, and increased the size of Russia by half a per cent. The price of his illusions was not only thousands of lost lives, but also a lost future for Russia.

Owen Matthews is Russia correspondent at the ‘Spectator’ magazine, former Moscow bureau chief at ‘Newsweek‘ and the author of ‘Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine‘