Strange New World

Global Putinism, Gangsterism, and the Crisis of the West

The mob boss as president.

There has been an elephant in my classroom all semester.

And as I've taught my usual lineup of courses on Russian politics at the University of Texas-Arlington, this elephant has become just too damn big to ignore. Because the content of these courses, which I have been teaching for years, has suddenly become unavoidably and frighteningly relevant to our current American moment.  

Over the past few months, as I've lectured about the erosion of Russia's weak and fledgling democratic institutions in the 1990s, the rise of the Russian oligarchy, the advent of Vladimir Putin, and the establishment of what I call gangsterism as governance, students have inevitably and persistently been asking a very uncomfortable question: Aren't we now witnessing something analogous in the United States?

In other words, are we witnessing the export and replication -- or approximation -- of the system Putin built in Russia, with its arbitrary and personalized rule, unaccountable oligarchic dominance, captured institutions, and lack of regard for individual liberties and constitutionally protected freedoms? Is an American version of this kleptocratic and autocratic form of governance emerging?

I strive to keep my views on American politics out of the classroom, although I am certain that my students are clever enough to figure out where I stand. Moreover, in my career as a journalist, commentator, academic, and analyst, I've always been an Eastern Europeanist, not an Americanist. But I am also a politically engaged American with eyes, ears, and a brain. And just like my very perceptive students, I also see the obvious parallels between the world I've spent my adult life studying and the one that seems to be emerging on our American shores. So addressing this obvious question has become -- if I wish to be intellectually honest -- unavoidable. 

This essay is an attempt to do so. It is adapted from a public talk I gave at The University of Texas-Arlington’s McDowell Center for Global Studies on April 2, 2025. And before diving into the substance, I want to make clear what I am not claiming. First and foremost, I am not claiming that the U.S. is turning into a replica of Putin's Russia. What has happened in Russia over the past few decades has its own logic and its own roots in Russian history and political culture. And what is happening in the U.S. will play out according to its own American logic. Moreover, Russia’s fledgling democratic institutions of the 1990s, the ones that Putin set about destroying, were extermely weak, fragile, and barely a decade old. American institutions, on the other hand, are centuries old and presumably stronger.

Nevertheless, there does appear to be some universal trends at play. So what I do want to do is illustrate is that there are clear lessons we can derive, relevant to our current moment, from what happened in Russia over the past three decades. I also want to demonstrate that there has been a clear and concerted effort by the Putin regime to undermine Western democratic governance and export the Kremlin’s autocratic and kleptocratic model to the West. And I want to highlight some of the ways I see analogues and parallels between Putin's Russia and the contemporary United States, as well as the limitations of those parallels. 

I have described the existing Russian system alternatively as mafiaism and gangsterism, which I define as: a state whose internal logic, processes, incentive structure, and behavior resemble those of an organized crime syndicate. It is rule by an unaccountable clique whose exercise of power is not checked by institutional constraints.

Is this what we are moving toward? The short answer is, we are obviously not there yet. But the trend lines are not encouraging. The U.S. Congress appears to be in the process of de facto abrogating its Article 1 powers. Court orders and rulings are being circumvented, or even ignored. Due process and the right to habeas corpus appear to be in peril. The Trump administration has launched a campaign of intimidation against the media, judges, the legal profession, and the universities. And the role of Elon Musk in restructuring a government that he has billions of dollars of contracts with seems, taken together with the role of other tech billionaires, like a recipe for oligarchic rule.

And it is not like we haven’t seen this movie elsewhere, in various cultural contexts, where once-healthy democracies backslid into more authoritarian models: in Victor Orban's Hungary, in Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey, in Narenda Modi's India, and in Robert Fico's Slovakia.

Why would we think that we're immune to this trend? Why should we think that we Americans are so special and unique?

For example, when I lectured about the twisted logic and historical fallacies Putin uses to justify his designs on Ukraine claiming that it constitutes "historic Russian land," in past semesters I used to make the point that this was as absurd as if an American president claimed that Canada was really American territory, our 51st state. Now no American president would ever claim that, I would ask rhetorically, right? 

Well I guess I can't use that example anymore. In fact, columnists and commentators including David French of The New York Times and Will Saletan of The Bulwark have explicitly made connection between U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric toward Canada and Vladimir Putin’s approach toward Ukraine.

Putin’s Russia is effectively a crime syndicate masquerading as a state.

Gangsterism, the Highest Stage of Oligarchy

So what happened in Russia from 1991 to the present? In a nutshell, the following:

• The fall of Marxism-Leninism as a ruling ideology, which in addition to precipitating the fall of the Soviet Union, also removed any constraints on the exercise of power in Russia.

• An attempt, albeit halfhearted, to set up democratic institutions in the 1990s under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin.

• The steady erosion and corruption of those institutions throughout the Yeltsin years, beginning with the shelling of parliament in October 1993, the creation of a super-presidency, the rigging of privatization auctions, and the establishment of oligarchic rule.

• The rapid destruction of Russia’s weak institutions under Putin - including the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society - as well as the culling, taming, and housebreaking of Russia’s oligarchs, leaving him and his cabal of cronies to rule with impunity.

What do you get when you have a ruling clique and no institutions to hold them accountable? First you get oligarchy, the unaccountable rule of the few. And then, you get Gangsterism, in which this oligarchy is made monolithic and is dominated by one ruling clique. To paraphrase Lenin, gangsterism is the highest stage of oligarchy.

In recent articles in The Bulwark and The National Interest, I outlined what I call the seven tenets of Gangsterism as governance.

• Governance by a small cabal of elites and their cronies that relies on a web of patronage networks to enrich itself and maintain and exercise power outside formal, legal, and Constitutional institutions.

• A ruling elite that is willing and able to use extrajudicial force, including lethal force, to protect its interests and eliminate threats real and imagined, at home and abroad, and is capable of doing so without accountability or fear of reprisal.

• A state structure that is characterized by weak and feeble institutions, officially sanctioned kleptocracy, the preponderance of unwritten and informal rules, roles, and codes, and an absence of the rule of law.

• A political regime that is defined by an impulse to expand and control markets and territory and is convinced that such expansion is essential for its survival because the existence of the rule of law near its borders threatens its survival.

• A regime that uses corruption as an instrument of statecraft with the aim of co-opting, controlling, bribing, and blackmailing allies and adversaries both at home and abroad.

• A regime that uses geopolitical extortion as an instrument of statecraft by stoking instability in neighboring countries as a pretext for intervening to establish order, thereby functioning like an international protection racket.

• A regime that cloaks and justifies its predatory goals in grandiose rhetoric about traditions, values, religion, and history.

This is what we got in Russia once the independence of all the institutions -- the legislature, the civil service, the courts, the media, the universities, civil society, were debilitated, enfeebled, and eroded. This is what governance without accountability looks like. Again, we Americans aren’t there yet. But the trend lines are deeply disturbing.

Gangsterism as governance refers to a state whose internal logic, processes, incentive structure, and behavior resemble those of an organized crime syndicate.

The Plot Against the West

As Putin consolidated and expanded his power at home, he wasn’t just establishing an autocratic kleptocracy and attempting to restore an empire, he was also tapping into emerging global sentiments: distrust of institutions and anxiety about social, economic, and demographic change. It isn’t exactly an ideology, but sadly it has widespread appeal.

Starting, I believe, in 2012 or 2013, Putin and the Russian elite set about taking this model of gangsterism as governance global. And the ground was fertile. The West is experiencing its most acute crisis of confidence in at least a generation.

The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, the Iraq war and subsequent upheaval in the Middle East, the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Euro crisis and migrant crisis, and the covid-19 pandemic have all fed into this angst and malaise.

The economic and cultural shocks of globalization have caused a critical mass of citizens in the West to become alienated and disenfranchised. Advances in technology have put us at the mercy of algorithms that maximize and amplify outrage and turn that outrage into dollars.

Many are now saying that our institutions are broken; and our democracies dysfunctional. Many believe that Western liberal democracy is no longer working for them and they are seeking alternatives.

As Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, noted in a recent article, Putin understands that "If the Cold War’s central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states."

Back in 2013, Putin gave a speech to a joint session of the Russian legislature, touting Russia as a champion of traditional Christian values and deriding the West’s “genderless and infertile” liberalism. The speech came as the Kremlin was launching a campaign of repression against Russia’s LGBT+ community Days after Putin’s address, the Center for Strategic Communications, a Kremlin-connected think tank, issued a report titled: “Vladimir Putin: World Conservatism's New Leader.” 

The report argues that majorities in the West yearn for stability and security, favor traditional family values over feminism and gay rights, and prefer mono-ethnic nation-based states rather than multicultural melting pots. Putin, the report says, stands for these values against what it called the "ideological populism of the left" in the West — and effectively argues that Moscow should weaponize the West’s domestic politics against it.

The report argued that as the West becomes increasingly multicultural, less patriarchal, less traditional, Russia should be a lodestone for those who oppose this trajectory, and use this for the maximum Putinization of the world. I wrote about this report for The Atlantic back in 2013, and in retrospect, I didn’t take it nearly as seriously as I should have.

The rest, of course, is history. What followed was a massive active measures, propaganda, and disinformation campaign in the West, targeted by country to highlight key wedge issues, interference in elections including the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the 2017 French presidential election, and the 2017 German general election, just to name a few. What also followed was an emerging alliance between Putin’s Kremlin and high-profile figures on the Western far right.

In February 2019, Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov, a fascinating figure in Russian politics who in the past has served as the regime’s ideologist and dramaturgist, published a widely circulated article in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta titled "Putin's Long State." In the article Surkov made three broad arguments:

• Democracy is an illusion and works in the West only because people believe the illusion that they have choice;

• Putin has created a system that can rule Russia for 100 years, if not longer, because he understands the algorithm of the Russian people. In fact, Surkov claims that Putin's Russia is the fourth manifestation of the Russian state, following in the footsteps of Ivan III, who expanded the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, Peter I, who established the Russian Empire, and Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union.

• Putinism -- with its stress on sovereignty, populism, traditionalism, and patrimony -- is the ideology of the future and will challenge liberal democracy for supremacy.

And then Surkov said the quiet part out loud:

Foreign politicians accuse Russia of interference in elections and referendums across the globe. In fact, it is even more serious - Russia is interfering with their brains, and they do not know what to do with their own altered consciousness. Since the failed 1990s, our country abandoned ideological loans, began to produce its own meaning, and turned the information offensive back on the West. European and American experts began to err in their political forecasts more and more often. They are surprised and enraged by the paranormal preferences of their electorates. Confused, they announced the invasion of populism. You can say so, if you have no other words. Meanwhile, the interest of foreigners in the Russian political algorithm is understandable - there is no prophet in their homelands, and Russia has long ago prophesied everything that is happening to them today.

So here we are at a perplexing and frightening moment. If there is a silver lining in all this, it is the reaction that recent developments in the U.S. are sparking elsewhere in the democratic world. There has been a rally-around-the-EU-flag effect in Europe. Canada’s liberals, who appeared headed for a crushing defeat, now appear to be slight favorites in the upcoming elections. From Budapest to Belgrade to Tbilisi, civil societies are rising up against Putinist rule and against gangsterism as governance. It is as if the United States just broadcast a public service announcement warning other liberal democracies about the perils of the current path.