Change in Russia Will Come Suddenly—And We Must Be Ready

It’s only natural to feel depressed and hopeless—even angry—about Russia in 2025. It started a brutal war of aggression against its closest neighbor, there’s a level of domestic repression unparalleled since Joseph Stalin, including a fully entrenched dictatorship with no prospect of change in sight. And there’s a confrontation with the West so intense it’s bordering on a nuclear escalation. And all of this is happening with apparent support from the Russian public. The situation seems to confirm the worst stereotypes about Russians as being incapable of democratic governance and the inherently aggressive nature of the Russian state that is unable to live by the civilized rules of international behavior. Western policy planning, it would follow, must involve preparing for long-term confrontation, containment, and isolation of the Russian threat.

The next major shift in Russia’s political course will come as suddenly as every time before—and its direction, as well as its durability, will depend to a great extent on how the international community handles it.

This approach may seem rational—but only on the surface, and only if one ignores the fundamental lessons from Russia’s past that must guide any planning for the future. The most important lesson is also the most obvious: fundamental political change in Russia always came unexpectedly and suddenly. After mere months of turmoil, both Czarist rule (1917) and the Soviet system (1991) collapsed in a matter of days—and no one saw either coming.

Moreover, every period of openness and liberalization in Russia—be it the Great Reforms of Alexander II in the 1860s and 1870s, the “Khrushchev thaw” in the 1950s and 1960s, or Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Boris Yeltsin’s democratic experiments in the 1980s and 1990s—was preceded by a time of intense repression, insular nationalism, international isolation, and belligerence. The people who lived through the “Grim Seven Years” at the end of Nicholas I’s reign, the growing spiral of repression in the last years of Stalin, or the perilous escalation of the Cold War under Yuri Andropov could be forgiven for seeing neither hope nor future. It was only in hindsight that literary critic Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik could write, referring to Nicholas I’s final years, that “the pressure immediately and suddenly increased so much that it obviously could not last too long; in the hopeless gloom one could feel the light approaching.”

It is likely that something very similar will be written about the rule of Vladimir Putin—especially about the period that began with his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the breathtaking spiral of repression that followed. The next major shift in Russia’s political course will come as suddenly as every time before—and its direction, as well as its durability, will depend to a great extent on how the international community handles it.

You can engineer opinion polls and you can fix election results, but you can’t hide the sight of hundreds of thousands of people voting with their feet for the antiwar candidate.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice asks which way she ought to go, the Cheshire Cat responds: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” There is no better recipe for the West when it comes to finding the right approach to Russia. It is long past time to shed the false notion that some nations are unfit for democracy. As President Ronald Reagan noted in his Westminster Address (well worth rereading four decades later), “It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.” When it comes to Russia, this argument is not only condescending or downright offensive—it’s also plainly refuted by historical facts. As with many countries, the history of Russia consists of competing narratives—a despotic one, to be sure, but a democratic one too. The Golden Horde was a part of Russian history—but so were the Hanseatic republics of Novgorod and Pskov. Serious attempts to impose constitutional checks on the Russian monarchy began as early as the 17th century (with the Saltykov Constitution in February 1610)—long before other European nations went down this path. From the second half of the 19th century, Russia had local elected governments, trial by jury, and autonomy for universities—and serfdom in Russia was abolished four years earlier than slavery in the United States. With the onset of the 20th century came constitutional monarchy with a national parliament, competing political parties, and a free press. Russia had universal suffrage before Britain, Germany, or France. None of this fits into the stereotypical narrative of Russia’s “inevitable” autocracy.

More importantly, whenever Russians had an opportunity to freely choose between dictatorship and democracy—be it in the First Duma election in 1906, the Constituent Assembly vote in 1917, or the first-ever presidential election in 1991—they invariably chose democracy. And during times of severe repression—like today—many Russians have been willing to contest the official narrative, even at high personal cost. The record number of political prisoners in Putin’s Russia—more than in the whole of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s—speaks not only to the heightened cruelty by the regime but also of the fact that many people are protesting against it—in particular, against its war in Ukraine. Even more telling was the short-lived presidential campaign by former member of parliament Boris Nadezhdin who attempted to run against Putin in 2024 on an antiwar platform. Needless to say, he was barred from the ballot (opposition candidates in today’s Russia invariably are), but as soon as he announced his bid, hours-long lines of people suddenly formed in cities and towns across the country to sign his ballot access petitions.

It is important that the West prepares for the day after Putin: to seize the moment, to provide critical assistance for Russia’s transition to democracy, and to fully integrate it into the community of law-abiding nations.

You can engineer opinion polls and you can fix election results, but you can’t hide the sight of hundreds of thousands of people voting with their feet for the antiwar candidate. The Kremlin’s pretense of “universal support” for Putin and for his war was shattered in a matter of days. As one young woman wrote to me in prison from the Black Sea town of Novorossiysk after waiting for hours to sign Nadezhdin’s ballot petition, “I never realized how many of us there are.”

This is the side of Russia Vladimir Putin doesn’t want the world to see. But it is there, and it offers the best hope for a more peaceful, stable, and rules-based international order. Internal repression and external aggression always go hand-in-hand in Russia, and only when this authoritarian regime is replaced by a legitimately elected and accountable government will Russia stop being a threat to itself and to others. The free world should be clear about this ultimate goal and should find a way to support that (significant) part of Russian society that shares it. When the window of opportunity for change opens in Russia, it will again be sudden—and it will be brief.

It is important that the West prepares for the day after Putin: to seize the moment, to provide critical assistance for Russia’s transition to democracy, and to fully integrate it into the community of law-abiding nations. The only viable path to a Europe that would finally be whole, free, and at peace—the dream of generations of Western policymakers—lies through a democratic Russia. With the right conditions and with the right efforts, this future is within reach. But first, we must have an idea of where we want to get to.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian opposition politician, author, and historian. He was imprisoned in Russia between April 2022 and August 2024 for denouncing the war in Ukraine and was freed in the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War. He currently serves as vice president at the Free Russia Foundation.

Cover photo: In this Friday, August 23, 1991 file photo, people kick the head of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, in front of the KGB main headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, Russia. The statue was pulled down after the defeat of the August 1991 hardline coup. This was a watershed moment that symbolized the collapse of the repressive Soviet system. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko.