And how this is leading America’s Russia policy into dangerous places.
“Russia is finished,” cheerfully proclaimed The Atlantic on its May 2001 cover. The headline was wrong, but it proved to be really catchy. It has been echoed for over two decades by a host of experts, academics, and writers, with regular frequency. All the while, Russia, spiteful as ever, does not heed the experts’ opinions and does not seem to be collapsing anytime soon.
Instead, if anything is collapsing today, it is America’s ability to understand Russia, which was never great to begin with. The self-delusion of the foreign-policy “Blob,” coupled with the anti-intellectualism of the second Trump administration, joined by wartime cancel culture, and accompanied by dishonest sources—all created a cocktail of groupthink that posits that Russia is on the brink of collapse.
This cocktail is poison to Washington’s policy vis-à-vis Russia and Russians. It already led to wasteful spending, misguided diplomacy, and even attacks on free speech on US soil.
The sanctions did not manage to permanently reduce “the ruble to rubble,” as then-President Biden prematurely boasted. The combined might of the United States and its allies could not isolate “collapsing” Russia from the rest of the world. In the meantime, voices that could offer a more rational explanation of Russia to the public and policymakers are shunned. Even the most anti-Putin Russian intellectuals are canceled in American forums, while experts who try to argue for more nuance in America’s approach to Russia are branded as Kremlin stooges by the commentariat.
Some of “Russia is finished” fortune-telling is motivated by wishful thinking. There is no doubt that Russia, which has been waging a war of aggression on European soil since 2014, is easily painted as an eternal enemy of the West. Historian Yuri Slezkine even argued that the West still mainly defines itself through othering and fearing Russia. The Kremlin is also all too happy to present itself as a threat to what its propagandists call “the rotting West.”
But there is also no doubt that this wishful thinking is misled at best. Russia is nowhere close to collapsing. The “Russia is finished” articles, books, and video essays often point out genuine faults in the bizarre structure of Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s politics, rampant corruption, and inexorable population decline. They then make vague predictions about a return to the mayhem of the 1990s, a breakup of Russia along ethnic lines, total economic collapse, or a brewing popular uprising.
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The temptation to mock the collapse clairvoyance is strong. One could easily list all the objective reasons why Russia isn’t collapsing any time soon. The country’s economy has proven surprisingly resilient, able to withstand sanctions of historic proportions. While the Russian military is stuck in the blood and mud in Ukraine, it has repeatedly shown an ability to adapt rather than collapse.
Russia’s diplomacy, which is traditionally seen in the West as not much more than incoherent gopnik yelps, is making headway in the Global South where Russian state–affiliated media are important players and student exchange programs are in full swing.
Inside Russia, civilians live relatively normal lives and are likely not thinking of rising up with pitchforks against the Kremlin. Many of them enjoy new Hollywood releases, chic cafés, and exhibitions. Yes, life goes on, even as Russian cities are bombed and the economy is slowing down.
There is a feedback loop here: Russia keeps chugging along and pundits keep churning out doomsayings. It is tempting, when producing propaganda, to paint your elected enemy as on the brink of an abyss, needing only a little push to tip over and disappear. This is what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco described in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” writing that propaganda presents an enemy as both “too strong and too weak.” For the foreign-policy Blob, there is nothing better than an eternal weak-strong enemy, in opposition to which the military-industrial complex and its associated content factories can eternally justify their own existence.
As Russians say ironically, “Whatever we try to engineer, we always end up making a Kalashnikov rifle.” A similar ailment befalls the American field of Russia studies, which is riddled with military and intelligence interest. Owing to a robust Cold War heritage, key Russia studies programs and projects in the US are either linked to the Department of Defense or downright funded by it.
A securitized view of Russia is bound to produce a lopsided analysis that ignores or misunderstands Russian society. It already led to some odd investments under the Biden administration. Consider the “decolonization” boom of 2022–23, when many pages of good repute—including the aforementioned Atlantic—posited that the United States must go abroad to destroy the monster of Russian imperialism by breaking Russia apart along its ethnic lines. It would be easy, argued the newly minted anti-colonial activists, because Russia is already on the brink of collapse.
Decolonization forums were hosted at platforms like the Hudson Institute; foundations and pundits popped up all over the marketplace of ideas. Many were eager to take advantage of the robust grant-making system—like the late USAID—built to advance US power around the world. Unlike the anti-colonial movements of the 1970s, the decolonizers were excited to work with the US security services, openly seeking out funding and support.
The US support, however, did not result in much. Russia did not fall apart. In retrospect, it was probably odd to expect concrete results from groups who were trying to win Western support by promoting Manchurian separatists during an event in Kyoto; or at an event in Washington calling for a formation of an independent Novgorod (currently a city tucked within western Russia), with an economy based on “trade with the Hanseatic League”—which has been defunct since 1669.
Any anthropologist or sociologist focused on Russia could probably explain the patent absurdity of trying to break Russia apart. They could point out that the decolonizers have little to no support inside of the country, and that ethnic Russians make up the majority in most of the supposedly “ethnic minority” regions, while minority elites are tightly dependent on the Kremlin. They could say that, for example, Russia’s defense minister comes from the ethnically Turkic Tuva region, where his family long enjoyed elite status. That many in Russia’s ethnic minorities are profiting off the Kremlin’s war. But who wants to listen to anthropologists?
The second coming of Trump and the ensuing collapse of USAID with other grantmaking institutions did not improve the situation. The money might have stopped flowing toward clearly bizarre initiatives—but it stopped flowing toward rigorous study also, owing to the new administration’s apparent anti-intellectual bent.
In the age of unprecedented geopolitical competition, it would be sensible for Washington to invest in serious Russia studies departments at think tanks and universities. Yet American expertise on Russia is in its sundown hour now, as many such departments are shutting down or getting defunded, while think tanks are plagued by financial issues. Some of the leading centers of knowledge on Russia—like the Wilson Center—were shuttered by DOGE. In particular, the administration cut the FLAS funding, prompting even elite Ivies to scale back their Russia research.
Russia itself also became increasingly more isolated from Western researchers, a trend that began in 2014 and only got worse in 2022. Institutions on both sides broke contact: Russian institutions came out in support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (whether willingly or not), which Western institutions could not let slide.
This resulted in the status quo where many Western Russianists were de facto (and often officially) banned from the country they study. Russia even banned the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the chief US conference for such research. Very few American experts nowadays can safely travel to Russia. Moscow discourages Russian officials and experts from speaking to Americans. Unless, of course, these Americans are alt-right influencers like Candace Owens or Andrew Tate.
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American institutions—such as Yale University or even the Wild Salmon Studies Center (yes)— have been designated as “undesirable.” This means that any interaction with them could lead to criminal prosecution. A knowledge iron curtain is actively being constructed by Moscow.
This is not to say that the Western political atmosphere is conducive to free and open discourse. Those who advocate studying Russia more thoroughly run the risk of being branded as Kremlin mouthpieces for not demonstrating a sufficiently hawkish position. Meanwhile, the exiled Russian academics who manage to make it to the West are often deplatformed and ostracized not necessarily for their political stance as much as for being Russian.
This form of wartime cancel culture is of course more prominent in the EU, and especially the Baltic States. Take Estonia, which wantonly deported a respected Russian-Australian historian—apparently, for giving a Russian-language talk on North Korea. The idea of automatically rejecting even the most anti-war Russians occasionally rears its head in the US too, like at 2023 PEN America, where a panel of exiled Russian writers was canceled due to fears of Ukrainian boycott, prompting American journalist M. Gessen to quit the PEN board in protest.
As a result, the Russianists American public and policymakers might still see are not just underfunded but are feeling politically constrained by a groupthink that excludes anyone Russian, or even anyone with a nuanced position on Russia. The “politically correct” sources of Russia knowledge are thus reduced to an ever-shrinking group of hawkish exiles or even more hawkish Eastern Europeans, who are willing to perfectly toe the party line and espouse maximalist positions on Russia mixed with hopes of near-collapse.
Eastern European experts, like Ukrainians or Balts, often claim to have a unique expertise on Russia due to their having been on the receiving end of the Kremlin’s imperialism for many years. They are not hiding their default (and perhaps understandable) desire to see Russia collapse. The Russia studies approach popular in Eastern Europe nowadays is aimed at “decentering” Russians, and a popular refrain heard there is that to understand Russia one must listen not to Russians but to Ukrainians or other victims of Russia. To what extent this approach is analytically sound is questionable—after all, we don’t expect Vietnamese or Iranians to have the best insights into American domestic affairs.
The actual Russians who are sometimes listened to in this context are a specific brand of exiles. These experts that might have the ear of Western politicians are often outright anti-Kremlin activists. No wonder, since they saw their country being trampled into authoritarianism by Putin and his posse.
But their careers, in many cases, effectively depend on a collapse of Putinism—and perhaps Russia with it—within their lifetimes. They know that they have little to no support inside Russia. As exiled politician Ilya Ponomarev said, they can only return to Russia “through bayonets,” meaning a Western military intervention. As the bayonets are not coming anytime soon, not much is left for the underfunded, disunited, and depressed Russian opposition in exile except hope, which, as Russians say, “dies last.”
This hope leads to assertions about the inevitable collapse of Putin’s regime. In reality, of course, the exiles’ plans for an end to Putin’s regime are limited to finding a window of opportunity. Rational analysis is tainted by political objectives.
The US is thus discouraged from learning about Russia, while Russian intellectuals are discouraged from helping the US learn about Russia. This creates fertile ground for baseless speculations and wishful thinking about a nearing collapse.
Lastly, the cottage industry of predicting Russia’s collapse is also emblematic of a key vulnerability of the Western intellectual scene—a general inability and unwillingness to conceive of a sustainable alternative model to capitalist liberal democracy, what British philosopher Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism.
That is not to say that Putin’s Russia is somehow anti-capitalist or even that it is philosophically antithetical to the West. Russia’s war is now driven primarily by hyper-capitalist mechanics of huge payouts and debt forgiveness for frontline soldiers, supplemented by an economy that rewards investments into the ever-expanding military-industrial complex. Contemporary Russian intellectuals, even the pro-Kremlin ones like Alexander Dugin, ultimately see themselves as a part of a European intellectual tradition.
To add insult to injury, while the United States maintains the largest economy on the planet, it sure does not feel like this to an average American. Amid decaying infrastructure, skyrocketing prices and overall anxiety, it is easy for Americans to get hypnotized by the shiny façade Moscow can offer. MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens are perfectly willing to eat it up when they fawningly visit Russia grocery stores or churches.
Seen from Washington, Russia’s very existence outside of a US-led liberal world order is tantamount to resistance to this order. To those who still like to think that they live at the End of History, the continuing existence of Moscow is anathema because it threatens the very core of their worldview.
And if Russia can manage to not just exist but present a thriving image in comparison to the United States or the broader West—that is offense of the highest order. To accept that Russia can exist and even occasionally punch above its weight in challenging the West, whether through black ops in Africa or political meddling in Europe, is to contend with the idea that the liberal democratic model is not the only logical conclusion for every regime in the world.
And at the non-happening end of history, the US is thus left with a pool of Russia experts and policymakers who are given in to wishful thinking about Russia collapsing on its own, who don’t understand Russia and don’t want to in the first place. They are, as the Russians say, “dividing a hide of an uncaptured bear.” Whether they are doing so because of their lack of imagination or curiosity or they are impelled by some ulterior motives, the result is the same: misguided policies and intellectual decline.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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