One year after the war, Putin is creating the Russia he wants

The grievances, paranoia and imperialist mentality that led President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war: a broad, if uneven, social upheaval that has left Russia's leader more dominant than ever. in his country.

Students collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from "aggressors seeking world domination."

Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate and their anti-war artists and performers expelled.

The new state-organized exhibits carry titles like "NATOzism," a pun on "Nazism" intended to present the Western military alliance as as existential a threat as the Nazis of World War II.

Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that emerged in the first 30 years of post-Soviet Russia have come to an abrupt end, while

.

FILE - An exhibition of military equipment in Moscow.. (Nanna Heitmann/The New York Times)

As the anniversary of the invasion approaches on Friday, the Russian military has suffered one setback after another, falling far short of its goal of seizing control of Ukraine.

But at home, with little resistance, Putin's war year has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.

"Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God," Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultra-conservative business magnate, boasted in a telephone interview on Saturday.

.

The fact that the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia's transformation much more profound, he said, than it would have been if Putin's hopes of a quick victory had come true.

"If the Blitzkrieg had been successful, nothing would have changed," he said.

For years, the Kremlin tried to keep Malofeyev at arm's length, even as he bankrolled pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to reform itself into an empire of "traditional values" free from Western influence.

But that changed after the invasion, when

- signing a new anti-gay law, for example - while casting himself as another Peter the Great reclaiming lost Russian lands.

Most importantly, according to Malofeyev, Russian liberals have been silenced or have fled the country, while Western companies have left voluntarily.

This change was made clear last Wednesday at a gathering on the traffic-packed Moscow Ring Road, where some of the most prominent human rights activists who have remained in Russia gathered to celebrate the last of many recent farewells. : The Sakharov Center, a human rights archive that was a liberal center for decades, was opening its last exhibition before being forced to close under a new law.

The center's president, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, a former Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that "what we could not imagine two years ago, or even a year ago, is happening today."

"A new value system has been built," Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, said later.

A year ago, when Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility;

Putin, after all, had presented himself as a peace-loving president who would never attack another country.

So after the start of the invasion - which stunned some of the president's closest aides - the Kremlin was quick to adjust its propaganda to justify it.

It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing the "Nazis" who seized power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message said, and Putin's "special military operation" was aimed at ending the war he had started. West.

In a series of speeches intended to shore up domestic support,

for Russia's very identity, declaring that he was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being forced upon him by an aggressive West.

All the power of the State was deployed to spread and impose that message.

National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, abandoned entertainment programming in favor of more political news and talk shows;

schools were ordered to add a periodic flag-raising ceremony and "patriotic" education;

Police went after people for offenses such as anti-war Facebook posts, helping to drive hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.

"Society in general has gone off the rails," Sergei Chernyshov, director of a private institute in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, said in a telephone interview.

"They have turned the ideas of good and evil upside down."

Chernyshov, one of the few Russian school principals to have spoken out against the war, described the narrative of Russian soldiers fighting in defense of their nation as so easily digestible that much of society came to believe it, especially because

: their nation's victory in World War II.

A national campaign urging children to make candles for soldiers has become so popular, he said, that anyone who questions it in a school chat group can be called a "Nazi and a shill of the West."

Students during a visit to the Museum of Victory, dedicated to sacrifices and Russia's victory over Nazi Germany.

(Nanna Heitman/The New York Times)

At the same time, he argued, daily life has changed little for Russians without a relative fighting in Ukraine, which has hidden or mitigated the costs of war.

or wounded in Ukraine, a far graver toll than analysts had anticipated when the war began.

However, the economy has suffered far less than anticipated, as Western sanctions have failed to drastically reduce the quality of life for average Russians, despite the departure of many Western brands.

"One of the scariest observations, I think, is that, for the most part, nothing has changed for people," Chernyshov said, describing the urban rhythm of restaurants and concerts and his dating students.

"This tragedy is relegated to the periphery."

In Moscow,

a sprawling hilltop complex dedicated to the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union.

A new exhibit, "NATOzismo," declares that "the purpose of creating NATO was to achieve world domination."

A second, "Everyday Nazism," includes artifacts from the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which has far-right connections, as evidence for the false claim that Ukraine is committing "genocide" against the Russians.

"It was scary, creepy and horrible," said Liza, a 19-year-old customer, who did not want to give her last name because of the political sensitivity of the issue.

She said she was distressed to learn of this behavior of the Ukrainians, as presented by Russian propaganda.

"It shouldn't be like this," she said, showing her support for Putin's invasion.

Hundreds of students were visiting one recent afternoon, elementary school students parading in green army caps as their chaperone yelled, "Left, left, one, two, three!"

and addressed them as "soldiers".

In the main lobby, the studio for Victory TV - a channel created in 2020 to focus on World War II - was filming a live talk show.

"The framework of the conflict helped people come to terms with it," said Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent Moscow pollster.

"The West is against us. Here are our soldiers, there are the enemy soldiers, and within this framework, we must take sides."

Weeks after launching his invasion,

."

He has brashly wished "all the best!"

Western companies that have left the country, saying their departures create "unique development opportunities" for Russian companies.

But in Khabarovsk, a city on the Chinese border in Russia's Far East, Vitaly Blazhevich, an English teacher, says residents miss Western brands like clothing chain H&M.

As for the war, the dominant emotion was passive acceptance and the hope that things would be over soon.

FILE - Conscripted soldiers are welcomed back to Moscow.

(Nanna Heitman/The New York Times)

Blazhevich taught at a Khabarovsk state university until he was forced to resign on Friday, he said, for criticizing Putin in a YouTube interview with Radio Liberty, the US-funded Russian-language news channel.

They were the kind of comments that probably would not have been punished before the war.

Now, he said,

: "everyone is being rolled onto the asphalt."

Malofeyev, the conservative tycoon, said Russia still needed another year "for society to be completely cleansed of the last fateful years."

In his opinion, anything short of a "victory" in the Ukraine, complete with a parade in kyiv, could undo part of the transformation of the past year.

"If there is a ceasefire in the course of the spring," he said, "then some liberal return is possible." 

In Moscow, at a farewell ceremony held at the Sakharov Center, some of the older attendees pointed out that, in the arc of Russian history, the Kremlin's crackdown on dissent was nothing new.

Yan Rachinsky, president of Memorial, the rights advocacy group that was forced to disband at the end of 2021, said the Soviets banned so many things "

."

"But you can't stop people from thinking," Rachinsky continued.

"What the authorities do today does not guarantee them any longevity."

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