How Putin’s Regime Survivalism Drives Russian Aggression

Abstract

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984—which has become a bestseller among Russians after their country invaded Ukraine in February 2022— a dictatorship wages war not to achieve any foreign policy objective nor grand utopian vision, but to distract the population and break its desire to resist oppression and injustice at home. “[T]he consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger,” as Orwell put it, “makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.” Hijacked by a self-serving governing class, war is a callous hoax, its sole purpose to keep society in check and autocratic rule intact. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, aggression against Ukraine has served this Orwellian purpose since 2014. The annexation of Crimea defused the growing discontent and opposition to Russia’s dictatorship, raising Putin’s sagging approval ratings to stratospheric levels for four years, even as the Russian economy suffered. And the much larger conflict in 2022 still rallied Russian society behind its authoritarian ruler, despite inflicting crushing defeats, horrific casualties, and far more economic damage. But was tapping into the tremendous power of conflict to boost Russian authoritarianism the Kremlin’s primary motive to invade Ukraine? Many analyses of the causes of Russian aggression have ignored this explanation, preferring to focus on traditional realpolitik explanations that assume away the influence of