Walk through any Russian city, from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Yekaterinburg and Kazan, and you'll see people wearing navy or red sweatshirts with the iconic Soviet symbol of the hammer, sickle and star. You'll also see plenty of traditional fur hats adorned with a red star (even though recent winters have been the warmest on record).
Souvenir shops will welcome you with mugs bearing symbols of the USSR - portraits of Lenin, Stalin and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Even Vladimir Vysotsky, the raspy-voiced singer-songwriter and poet whose biting poetry was censored by the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s, has become part of this tour of Russian nostalgia. And its appearance could not be more appropriate: an idealized version of the past legitimizes a repressive present and future.
In central Moscow, I recently struck up a conversation with a newspaper vendor who explained that many people remember World War II as a time when Russians showed great courage, the early post-war years as a time of relative calm, and the 1970s as a time of stability. In his view, these “memories” fuel a longing for a strong “Soviet-style” leader.
The seller is aware that the prevailing narratives are wrong. “I was a boy when my family moved from a communal apartment (25 people crammed into five rooms) to a separate apartment,” he recalls. This change, facilitated by Nikita Khrushchev (the seller did not know he was my great-grandfather when we spoke), finally allowed his family to live as “independent people” rather than “ants in a big Soviet, Stalinist collective.”
However, in Russia today it is not customary to praise Khrushchev, who condemned Stalin, nor Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (who were too open, too eager for contact with the world). The vendor decorated his kiosk with portraits of the “dream team”: Lenin, Stalin, Gagarin, Vysotsky, as well as the Soviet-style Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. When I asked “why,” he replied: “For the sake of the people.”
My interlocutor, a retired electrician, has plenty of time to watch movies at work. Astonishing me with his knowledge of international cinema, he offered a whole menu of definitions of nostalgia. In Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, nostalgia is a consolation for those who don't believe in the future. And in the American TV series Mad Men (his favorite), it is a pain-fueled desire to return to one's roots. Both interpretations can be applied to today's Russia.
In contrast, recent Russian films “raise nostalgia like yeast,” the salesman continued. He was referring in part to a slew of remakes of fairy tales and Soviet classics such as The Last Knight, Ognivo and Cheburashka (the Soviet version of Mickey Mouse), as well as new films based on Russian folk characters and historical heroes. Films and television series, all in a triumphant spirit, about World War II are also on the rise...
This is no coincidence, as Putin has long understood that nostalgia is a powerful tool for calming – and subduing – the public. By the time he first became president, in 2000, Russians had already experienced the collapse of an empire, a sharp decline in the country’s global standing, and aggressive “shock therapy” that produced an unbridled form of capitalism. Many missed the simplicity of the past, a time when they knew their place and did not have to compete for a living; they longed to feel proud, secure, and respected again.
Recognizing these desires, Putin restored the Soviet anthem, approved by Stalin himself in 1943, and the Red Army flag as the official flag of the Russian army. He appropriated Vysotsky, who, although a rebel, was also a patriot. The Kremlin's sepia-toned depictions of the Soviet years gradually penetrated people's souls.
Today, television programs feature famous artists singing Soviet songs; there are TV channels that broadcast only Soviet films; and commercials glorify Soviet heroism and reject Western influences. In one recent ad, a grandfather shows his grandson classic Soviet characters as a substitute for The Avengers or Aquaman (franchises that are unavailable to Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022). “We’ll watch them with pancakes, not popcorn,” the boy says happily.
Art exhibitions are now inevitably associated with Soviet themes. On Monday mornings, schools play the Russian national anthem—a Stalinist-era tradition that was deemed redundant when I was in school in the 1970s, but was revived in 2022 with the outbreak of the Ukrainian war. That same year, Alexander Fadeev's 1946 novel The Young Guard—a thoroughly mediocre work about the heroic struggle of Soviet youth in German-occupied Ukraine—was added to school curricula, and a new state-sponsored youth movement, the Movement of the Firsts, was formed, modeled on the Soviet Komsomol and Young Pioneers.
Nostalgia calms people in times of uncertainty, but it also keeps them obedient. The logic is this: Russians cannot complain if they suddenly have to tighten their belts because their ancestors sacrificed much more without complaint. Just look at the great feats they accomplished, the great victories they won - and all for the sake of the Fatherland. When one of the skiers, an Olympic medalist, complained about the poor conditions at a recent competition in Kazan, the president of the Ski Federation sharply rebuked her, saying that athletes of previous generations had it much worse.
Therein lies the danger of nostalgia and its appeal to Putin: if Russians are consumed by a longing for an imaginary past, they will not fight for a better future, and the Kremlin can freely restore elements of the real past that are anything but desirable. Nothing can rouse a person from a nostalgic reverie like gulags and enforced disappearances.
The author is a professor of international affairs at the New School of New York University
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. (translation: NR)
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