What The Hell America!

When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 2000, his legitimacy was paper-thin. The country had defaulted on its debt two years earlier. Pensioners were protesting in the streets. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had become a walking punch line.​​ Russia was still reeling from the humiliation of losing the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Putin rode into the Kremlin partly on a promise that he would restore the country’s standing in the world. But he understood from the start that to consolidate power, he’d have to offer Russians something more than a vision of greatness. The circus—military parades, shirtless equestrianism, singing “Blueberry Hill”—would come later. First, Putin had to take care of bread.

Today, many commentators compare President Donald Trump’s second term to Putin’s rise to czardom in Russia. Certainly, Trump has adopted many of the same measures Putin and other autocrats did to secure control; he’s ginned up animus against domestic enemies (migrants and liberal elites) and foreign ones (the countless nations “ripping us off”) while transforming the Department of Homeland Security into an enforcement apparatus that is seemingly impervious to federal laws.

But for someone taking so many cues from the Russian dictator, Trump is missing a crucial element that made Putin’s consolidation of power successful: economic stability. Trump seems to assume that cultural grievance, partisan backing, and his innate talent for dominating the news cycle will matter more than quiet economic competence and tangible results. But within the first 100 days of his second term, 53 percent of Americans said that the economy had gotten worse since Trump took office, and 41 percent said that their own finances have taken a hit.

Read: Autocracy crushed my alma mater. Then I got to Columbia.

A senior Kremlin official once told me that Stalin’s No. 1 problem was his inability to delegate. Putin did not share this weakness. He saw how Yeltsin’s presidency had collapsed under the weight of economic chaos and repeated financial crises, and that if he wanted his own regime to survive, he would have to delegate monetary and fiscal policy to competent people, rather than making it an extension of his ideological project.

Months before he became president, Putin tasked his longtime associate Herman Gref—then first deputy minister of state property—with drafting a sweeping pro-market reform plan. Gref was one of several officials appointed to the top tier of government who didn’t come from Putin’s KGB days, or even share the president’s vision of a neo-imperial Russia. They were technocrats, and their effect on the regime—and its stability—was just as important as that of the Kremlin’s propaganda and security apparatus. Maybe even more so.

“Economic performance was key for Putin’s popularity, just as underperformance was key for Yeltsin’s lack of support,” Sergei Guriev, the dean of London Business School and the former chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, told me. He noted that Putin was lucky in his timing: When he took office, oil prices were relatively high, and the economy under Yeltsin had reached a low point.

Gref delivered a 10-year road map that included tax cuts, deregulation, land reform, and pension restructuring. Putin implemented many of these proposals within his first three years in office. Not all of them—only about a third of the plan was ultimately realized—but the reforms that did go through made a significant impact. They sparked investment in agriculture, encouraged small businesses to leave the gray market, and improved the entrepreneurial climate. Macroeconomic stability, bolstered by booming oil prices, helped Russia repay much of its debt and build up financial reserves. When Putin came to power, Russian GDP per capita was less than $1,400; by the end of his second term, it had increased ninefold, reaching $12,500.

The Kremlin wrapped its economic policies in confident, populist messaging. At the core of Putin’s narrative was the promise to restore stability and dignity after the chaos of the 1990s. State media drove the point home: Under Putin, wages and pensions were paid on time, economic collapse had been averted, and ordinary Russians were finally seeing tangible improvements. He was cast as the guarantor of both order and welfare.

The regime leaned heavily into what analysts call the “myth of authoritarian competence.” And although the “order” part was often undercut by terrorist attacks and unrest in the Caucasus, the “welfare” message stuck; the numbers, at least for a time, were solid.

The 2008 financial crisis became the first big test of Putin’s economic policy and the propaganda that serviced it. Oil prices crashed, and Russia entered a serious recession. The country invaded Georgia in 2008, giving Putin’s already high approval ratings an eight-point boost to 88 percent; but the nationalist surge risked wearing off because the government was not responding to the economic downturn. The Kremlin finally rolled out an anti-crisis plan in March 2009—and its propaganda went into overdrive.

I was in Moscow at the time, working as a producer for Russian television. A Kremlin-approved talking point for a 2009 show I worked on read as follows: “The government wasn’t caught off guard by this crisis. In fact, it could be a turning point, as our country finally has the chance to claim its rightful place among the world’s economic superpowers.” We framed the crisis as an opportunity.

Putin addressed the public, insisting that the people were the priority—stable pensions, salaries for the workers, and their ability to weather the storm. He held carefully scripted, televised meetings with oligarchs and officials, presenting himself as a leader who felt the people’s pain and shared their frustration. Our messaging wasn’t meant to rally the base against the opposition or even the West. It was meant to reassure the entire nation: Putin’s “anti-crisis plan should unite all political parties around a single goal,” I wrote, “to protect the quality of life for all Russians—regardless of what happens in the world’s financial markets.”

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Our narrative mattered, but it was not determinative. In their book The Popularity of Authoritarian Leaders, Guriev and Daniel Treisman note that citizens’ direct experience of changing wages, prices, and employment levels limits the power of censorship and propaganda. The Kremlin’s ability to credibly exaggerate Putin’s compassion and the government’s competence, or to shift blame to oligarchs and faceless bureaucrats—the Russian “deep state”—had limits. What would ultimately restore public confidence were the facts: One of Russia’s technocrats, the Western-leaning finance minister Alexei Kudrin, had steered the country through years of fiscal conservatism, which had stocked Russia’s sovereign wealth funds with enough petrodollars to buffer the 2008 crash.

Trump, in contrast to Putin, seems to have delegated neither economic management nor communications to specialists. The most powerful man in the world still answers his own phone, writes his own “truths,” and spins his own economic policy. The latter is framed as nothing short of a war: “Our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered,” Trump declared. “Foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once-beautiful American Dream.” Faced with adverse results to his policies—inflation ticking up, consumer sentiment dropping, markets reacting poorly—Trump has been dismissive. He has said that tariffs are “like medicine. They might sting a little, but they cure the disease.” Then he told reporters,“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30”—invoking children’s discomfort, a rhetorical move most leaders instinctively avoid. “So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”

Those tasked with spreading, or at least softening, Trump’s message are forced to parrot the president or risk his ire. But public statements seemingly designed to satisfy one man’s ever-changing narrative fail to reassure markets, voters, or institutions. In a span as short as 48 hours, the president and administration officials will give multiple, often contradictory statements on economic policy, leading markets to crash or surge.

The administration ultimately loses control of the narrative as a result. Headlines about retaliatory tariffs, bond-market turmoil, and looming price hikes threaten to crowd out the Trump team’s more popular messages on rooting out undocumented migrants and DEI. Jobs surged in March, and GDP grew by 2.4 percent in the last quarter of 2024—but this good news was buried beneath Trump’s chaotic tariff messaging. Trump repeatedly postponed the tariffs, leading even Fox News to question whether he had capitulated. The president’s approval ratings slid, so he attacked the polls. The economy contracted last month, and Trump deflected: “That’s Biden, not Trump.”

Russian technocrats were bad public speakers. They could never improvise colorful one-liners, such as Howard Lutnick’s assertion that the Europeans “hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak,” but that was precisely the point. They were not there to mouth Putin’s talking points—they were there to reassure. If a Russian billionaire had gone on air declaring that the country’s “great” economy “is the winner here” while standing in front of a screen flashing huge market losses, those responsible would have lost their jobs.

In 2011, street protests erupted across Russia, challenging Putin’s rule. Consolidating his personal power became Putin’s overriding imperative. Had he been more interested in economic growth, he might have adopted reforms—privatization, deregulation, an independent judiciary, and prosecuting corruption, including among his own inner circle. But Putin was not prepared to empower independent actors who might weaken his grip.

Unable to reform without undermining a political model built on centralization, loyalty, and corruption, Putin abandoned the promise of shared prosperity. The Russian economy never regained the momentum of his first decade in power: By 2019, GDP had grown just 2 percent above its 2008 level.

Putin turned instead to foreign conquest—Crimea, then Donbas, then the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But he still took economic stability seriously, as something more than a messaging problem. When the first wave of Western sanctions hit in 2014, Elvira Nabiullina, the respected head of the Russian Central Bank, aggressively raised interest rates and allowed the ruble to float, meaning that the market would determine its value. Most Russians see the dollar-ruble exchange rate as the key indicator of economic stability, so this was a punishing strategy. Many in Parliament called for Nabiullina’s resignation, with one member from the ruling United Russia party calling the Central Bank an “enemy of the nation,” adding that it was bent on doing “evil.”

Nabiullina spoke in Parliament and made a 12-minute appearance on prime-time news. She didn’t invoke any of the usual propagandist clichés—Crimea, the Russian world, the evil West—but spoke instead like an economics professor, lecturing on currency speculation and the Central Bank’s rationale for letting the ruble float. Putin, notably, refrained from either criticizing or praising her, saying only, “You can go after Nabiullina, but don’t forget that overall,” the Central Bank’s “policy is reasonable.”

Inflation was tamed. The ruble stabilized. And despite heavy sanctions, Russia weathered the storm without a full-scale financial meltdown. For these measures, Nabiullina was named Central Bank Governor of the Year by Euromoney magazine. The Kremlin, notably, avoided selling the public easy promises or denials during the period of economic pain, betting that monetary discipline would do more than a propaganda campaign to preserve long-term regime stability.

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Following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia became the most heavily sanctioned country on Earth. The Kremlin redoubled its repression and curbed nearly all forms of free speech, pushing many Russians to emigrate. Yet it has also mounted an enormous effort to stabilize its consumer economy through parallel import—the practice of importing goods without the permission of the original manufacturer. The government has made sure that Coca-Cola is still available, people can buy new cars, and Boeing and Airbus jets—banned from being serviced in the West—still fly. The fact that life in Russia has remained “normal” for consumers has become an implicit propaganda feat in itself.

Contrary to what many in the Russian opposition movement say, today’s Russia isn’t run on repression and propaganda alone. At its core, Putin’s relationship with the Russian people is still a transactional one. In wartime Russia, welders in military factories are reportedly earning more than $40,000 a year—four times the national median. Men are paid up to $36,000 for signing up to fight in Ukraine; if they’re killed, their families can get up to $150,000 in compensation. On a typical recruitment poster, the promised salary takes up twice as much space as the national flag or military slogans.

“The fact that there are massive payouts suggests that even after 2022, Putin has not been able to construct a convincing ideology,” Sergei Guriev, at London Business School, told me. Money—not greatness—may be selling young Russians on Putin’s war.

Trump, in contrast, seems to be banking on cultural affinity and his own charisma. One hundred days into his presidency, his message on the economy isn’t We’ll protect your pensions, your wages, your savings. It’s Only the weak will fail.

Any authoritarianism is dangerous for the people. But one without even an illusion of economic stability can be dangerous for the authoritarian himself. Maybe Putin, in one of his long conversations with Trump, can tell him: The circus is vital, but you should never take away the bread.