Russia is going through the latest phase of its journey through authoritarianism.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Russia is going through the latest phase of its journey through authoritarianism. The state increasingly perceives itself as the unchallenged proprietor of society, and is upping its show of power. Those who value freedom can expect to suffer, while the regime, indulging the chimera of ultra-jingoism, will encourage passivity and privation among the wider public. For the West, Moscow has a separate proposal: the Kremlin will try to exploit its curious balancing act as both alleged war criminal and co-sponsor of peaceful reconciliation, and not only in Ukraine and Syria.

Like it or not, the West will have to coexist with this Jekyll-and-Hyde Russia for a long time, but if it fails to mark out the contours of the post-Putin setup and navigate them, the “next” Russia might be even longer in the making.

The recent State Duma elections marked an important stage in the country’s continued slide into authoritarianism. On 18 September, Russia effectively buried the institution of parliamentarianism even deeper in the ground – and not just because United Russia (UR) regained its constitutional majority (other parliamentary parties have always willingly made up for any shortfall in UR seats). Worse than that, the Russian parliament was decisively stripped of its vital representative function. If the fraud factor is removed, we see that turnout was 36.5%, meaning that UR formed a constitutional majority from just 15% of the total number of voters. Understandably, many people did not want to participate in such a farce, while a post-election poll by Levada Center pointed to a catastrophic loss of confidence in the State Duma (down from 40% to 22% over the past year).

Having clothed itself in defective legitimacy, the new Duma is sure to resemble the previous one. Moreover, given the acuteness of the moment (the forthcoming presidential elections), security and self-preservation will be top of the agenda, meaning more enforcement measures.

The presidential elections, as any event with Vladimir Putin’s personal involvement, will be run like a black-ops mission. For civil society, the result will be more oppression. Even now, FSB border guards are making a point of scrutinising the foreign passports of political scientists, human rights advocates and civil society activists, applying psychological pressure, clearly intimating that they are being watched and that their freedom of movement rests solely on uniformed officers taking orders from above. And that’s only the beginning.

What is already clear is that the presidential campaign will unfold against the backdrop of the ongoing economic crisis. The government hopes that next year real incomes will finally show moderate growth (albeit less than 1%, but after three years of decline any upturn would be welcome). But this is only one of several forecasts, some of which are decidedly less optimistic.

Nor has the regime forgotten its other obligations. Spending on education in 2017 is set to rise by a symbolic 2%, although health care will see its budget slashed by 33% with immediate effect. Allocations for the security services, although not immune to the cuts, will still exceed outlays on education by a factor of 9:3 and health care by 14.

Worst of all, the result of the TV propaganda blitz is that half of all Russians now consider defence a priority. Those who refuse to swallow the war rhetoric are gradually becoming strangers in their own land – every one of the last five years has seen 120,000 people leave the country. Regrettably, it is mostly young, well-educated, financially and intellectually independent people who feel cold-shouldered.

Even those not planning to leave are not holding their breath for the Kremlin to embrace modernisation. After all, if the regime were to start tackling systemic corruption for real, its power base would collapse. If the courts were let off the leash to reanimate business, ditto. If professionalism were to replace loyalty, same result. If the regime tried to spur homegrown productivity by introducing truly free elections, the system and everything around it would crumble to dust. In fact, the only option left on the table is to carry on raising the stakes in the new Cold War with the West and to explain to the domestic audience that all the country’s woes are caused by external enemies and their Russian accomplices.

No one knows when or in what condition the Putin regime will leave the country. Nevertheless, Russia is destined to advance along European lines, and today’s fretful isolationist games will surely be followed by a renewed pivot to the West in search of modernisation.

For this to happen, Western countries need to develop a clear, long-term vision of Russia to help my country rediscover its historically preordained European path of development. Since Russia cannot be successfully modernised without a competitive political environment and a developed civil society (wholeheartedly rejected by Putin), Western politicians and Western society, in mapping out an image of the future, must try to look not so much at Putin, but through him.

It is Germany, with its deep knowledge of Russia, which could initiate a fruitful discussion centred not on Putin and his whimsical foreign policy, but on the processes that will inevitably occur within Russian society and the economy. Only then will Western countries be better prepared for change in Russia than they were in 1991. In the transitional post-Putin period, the West should be willing to offer Russia essentially only three things: European values (based on practical experience), technology and reintegration. Everything else will be in the capable hands of post-Putin Russians themselves.

This article first appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung