Russia's evolution frustrated many of the hopes that Soviet and then Russian reformers as well as liberal and well-wishing Western scholars and analysts nurtured about the country's future from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Many does not mean all: despite all that went wrong or stayed bad, life in today's Russia is for most people freer, more open, and more comfortable than it was in Soviet times. Yet, the Putin regime's rapidly evolving and unpalatable ideological bundle, as well as its harsh and aggressive posture and behaviors, on both the internal and the international fronts, accounts for the bitter disappointment with Russia's inner political evolution and foreign behavior and begs for explanations, especially in view of the high hopes raised, in the West as well as in Russia, by perestroika first and by the post-1991 reforms later on.1
Because historians have been busy investigating earlier periods, notably Stalinism,...