More than 25 years ago, at the outset of Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia’s political future felt undetermined, or at least full of contradiction. The state nurtured some freedoms but repressed others; it made a nod toward democracy yet kept its politics carefully managed. It flung open the doors to free-market capitalism but allowed those same markets to be preyed upon by oligarchs, insiders, and corrupt officials. And it tolerated a degree of feisty, muckraking journalism, even if it subjected reporters engaged in that work to pressure and threats. Above all, with rising oil prices and living standards and growing ties to the West, Russia seemed to offer its citizens a decent, even promising existence—on the condition that they stay out of politics, a dominion ceded to the state.

What the state lacked, and not by accident, was any particular ideological orientation. In part, this was a reflection of political reality. In the years after 1991, Russians were trained cynics, having lived through Soviet decline and collapse; forcing belief would be a difficult endeavor, with an unclear upside. They then entered the twenty-first century with conflicting ideas and views—Was communism a virtuous system or an idiotic one? Was the Soviet collapse a moment of freedom and opportunity or a hardship? So it seemed better to keep the tent big, to borrow from the world of American party politics, than to force a reckoning on what people should or should not believe.

But it was also a matter of law. Article 13 of Russia’s post-Soviet constitution formally recognized the state’s ideological diversity and prohibited the establishment of any single state ideology. Even Putin paid lip service to this principle. As the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan observe in Our Dear Friends in Moscow, their colleagues interviewed Putin in 2000, in his first months in office, and asked him whether Russia needed a new ideology. He dismissed the idea out of hand. “It cannot be invented on purpose,” he said, adding that the country needed instead to “strengthen the state, the economy, and democratic institutions, including the free press.”

Today, that sounds like a long-​forgotten fantasy. The Kremlin no longer holds to any democratic pretensions. Putin appears destined to rule indefinitely, and even far down the ballot, independent candidates are kept from running. The free press is gone, as are all manner of basic freedoms, however limited: a “like” on the wrong social media post or a donation to a foundation deemed illegal are enough to merit a lengthy prison sentence. The economy has been largely cut off from the West; travel to Europe is fraught, expensive, and complicated. Above all, the state has seized on ideology to justify itself to the public and provide an orienting narrative: imperialist and militaristic, conservative and anti-Western, undergirded with an atavistic sense of both grievance and righteousness.

Two new books trace the arc of this transformation, presenting the reemergence of ideology as a central question for both state and citizen in today’s Russia. In Our Dear Friends in Moscow, Soldatov and Borogan look to their own generation. They tell the story of a one-time group of friends and colleagues, young Russians who, over the course of the Putin years, steadily accommodate themselves to the ruling system, drift toward nationalist and illiberal ideas and justifications, and end up as supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine. By centering their book on the shifting values of these friends, Soldatov and Borogan show how Putin’s deliberate strategy to “wall off Russia from the West,” as they put it, has been enabled and augmented by Russians themselves.

In Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime, the French historian and political scientist Marlene Laruelle demonstrates how the ever-shifting dynamic between state and society has been central to Putin’s power. Putin’s effort to construct a new national-imperial ideology, she suggests, relies not only on values imposed from above but also on exploiting ideas and strains of thought already circulating in society. Together, these books suggest that far from arbitrary or irrational, the ideas that have driven Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and broader conflict with the West have resulted from the long and evolving interplay between the Putin system and the people it rules.

In the opening scenes of Our Dear Friends in Moscow, Soldatov and Borogan have just been hired by the newspaper Izvestia, a former state mouthpiece that became an independent paper after the Soviet collapse. During the 1990s, Izvestia had gained a modicum of spunky, speak-truth-to-power freedom, and the authors quickly found themselves thrust into a spirited and ambitious circle of colleagues, friends, rivals, lovers, and intellectual sparring partners. At the center of this cohort was Petya Akopov, then a political correspondent for the paper, and Marina, his chain-smoking wife, who together hosted drinking bouts and philosophizing sessions in their handsome apartment overlooking Gogolevsky Boulevard, a........

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