Why does Russia keep rebuilding the same dictatorship, century after century, even though that system makes almost everyone inside it poorer, weaker, and less free?

This is one of the questions I hear most often under my videos.

Russia has immense talent. Immense resources. And yet, again and again, it ends up with the same familiar pattern: a tiny group at the top grows rich and untouchable, while everyone below learns to obey, flatter, steal, endure, and call it patriotism.

So what if the mystery is not really a mystery?

What if Russia keeps failing for the same reason a neighborhood ruled by the mafia fails?

Because a mafia does not exist to make people prosperous. It exists to control the territory, extract tribute, eliminate rivals, and make sure that every path to survival runs through the boss.

And once you look at Russia through that lens, a lot of things suddenly become much easier to understand.

Today, I want to answer a blunt question: is Russia actually just a giant mafia extortion racket wearing the costume of a state?

Not as an insult. As a structure.

Here’s our roadmap:

• The Mafia State — what separates a real government from a predatory system
• The Survival Monopoly — how protection became the original source of power
• The Chain of Obedience — why rule by favor inevitably breeds corruption and dependence
• Why the Cage Rebuilds Itself — why Russian revolutions keep replacing one boss with another
• The Monopoly on Reality — how a mafia state controls truth, faith, education, isolation, and even the right to succeed

The Mafia State

At a distance, a functional state and a mafia state can look deceptively similar. Both collect revenue, maintain a bureaucracy, and exercise a monopoly on force. But the difference is structural, not aesthetic. It lies in the purpose of power.

A legitimate state exists to sustain society. It is a tool for collective survival, designed to manage infrastructure, adjudicate disputes, and limit violence so that people can plan their lives beyond the next sunrise.

A mafia, however, exists to extract rent. 

In a functional state, taxes are a “common pot.” You pay into it—often reluctantly—expecting a return in the form of roads, schools, and predictable safety. The rules, however flawed, are visible and theoretically subject to change.

In a mafia state, taxes are “tribute.” You pay because the people above you have the capacity to hurt you. Whether they call it taxes, “voluntary donations,” or administrative fines, the translation remains the same: Pay us, and we might leave you alone. And it’s none of your business how we are going to spend the money.

The population is not a group of citizens; they are a resource to be mined.

In the 21st century, a mafia state cannot survive as an overt criminal gang. It requires the “furniture” of a modern nation—flags, hymns, ministries, and international agreements—to project legitimacy. This scenery serves a dual purpose: it allows the regime to trade globally and it provides a “diplomatic shield,” claiming, “We are a real country, no worse than any other.”

But look behind the curtain, and the functional logic of these institutions reverses:

• Police: In a state, they enforce the law; in a mafia, they protect the regime.
• Courts: In a state, they limit power; in a mafia, they punish enemies.
• Parliament: In a state, it is where interests collide; in a mafia, it is stage scenery where the bosses’ decisions are given the veneer of public consent.
• Constitution: In a state, it binds the ruler; in a mafia, it is a flexible document that adapts to the Boss’s needs.

The regime maintains this ‘theatre of democracy’ not to fool you, but to mask the only thing that actually keeps them in power: a total monopoly on every resource required for your survival.

By seizing control of power, property, information, and violence, the mafia ensures that no alternative can grow. If you have no independent court to protect your business, no independent media to voice your grievance, and no status that isn’t granted by the system, your dissent is neutralized.

You may hate the Boss, you may mock the regime in private, but without independent pillars of support, you are trapped. The system survives because it has systematically dismantled every tool the population could use to build something new.

The Survival Monopoly

A mafia state cannot survive in a competitive environment. It is too inefficient and too predatory to win on a level playing field. It only thrives where alternatives are dead—where the resources of survival are concentrated in a single, iron hand.

To understand why Russia keeps rebuilding this cage, we have to look past politics and into the very soil and water of the Eurasian plain.

In Western Europe, rulers were forced to bargain because, for much of history, wealth was not concentrated in a single center. Geography and infrastructure created many paths to prosperity, and therefore many sources of political power. Western and Southern Europe inherited Roman roads and ports that allowed commerce to flourish beyond the control of any single king.

Navigable rivers like the Rhine, Seine, and Danube flowed into open seas. Moving goods by water was cheap and fast, allowing merchants, guilds, and cities to grow rich on their own.

Many players—nobles, bishops, and town councils—had their own “walls and weapons,” so they had to negotiate. Out of this friction, the law was born.

Muscovy had none of these advantages. There were no Roman roads and no easy access to the world’s oceans. Its rivers flowed to the frozen Arctic or the landlocked Caspian. Access to the Black Sea was a battlefield contested by Lithuanians, Poles, and the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Poor soil and short growing seasons meant that peasants could barely feed themselves. There was almost no surplus wealth to fund an independent middle class or a defiant nobility.

In this environment, independent wealth didn’t just fail to thrive; it was nearly impossible to build.

While European cities were often seen as prizes to be taxed and preserved, the lands of Rus faced a more existential threat: the Great Steppe.

For centuries, nomadic raiders did not come to govern. They came to harvest. They took loot, and they took people. Thousands were dragged into slave markets and sold across what is now Turkey and North Africa. In that brutal reality, the only thing more valuable than food was protection.

This is where the survival monopoly began. Resources flowed toward whoever could defend the land from the steppe, because that defense was a matter of life and death. But when one center controls nearly all resources, it also gains the power to abuse them — and, over time, to treat both the land and its people as property.

Think of it like a family:

If several brothers are strong, they argue and bargain. No one is the absolute master.

If one brother is significantly stronger, he takes the best room and the best food. Eventually, he ensures no younger brother ever grows strong enough to challenge him.

In Muscovy, the state became that “stronger brother.” 

Private wealth could only exist under the Prince’s wing, the Prince eventually became the de facto owner of everything.

Nobles didn’t “own” land; they held it in exchange for absolute obedience.

Peasants were locked to the soil because the state could not afford to lose its labor force.

This wasn’t caused by “Russian genes” or a mystical “soul.” It was a cold, structural response to a harsh environment. But once all resources—land, labor, and safety—were concentrated in one hand, the soil was perfectly fertilized for a systemic mafia.

The Chain of Obedience

In a state where all meaningful resources are concentrated in one pair of hands, there can be no real politics based on competition for power. What emerges instead is politics based on competition for the ruler’s favor.

Careers are made not by persuading voters, building coalitions, or proving that your ideas work, but by becoming the person the supreme leader trusts most. The person who best understands his wishes. Who can carry out his vision, soothe his anxieties, flatter his vanity, and arrange the world so that the head of the mafia remains comfortable, entertained, and unchallenged.

If the autocrat is personally interested in governing, like Peter the Great or Stalin, the whole court begins to perform the role of tireless statesmen, harnessed to one cart and dragging it wherever the ruler wants it to go.

If the throne is occupied by someone like Catherine I, who had once been a servant, or the infant Ivan VI, the elite adjusts just as easily. Then its task is not to help the ruler govern, but to make sure the ruler lives pleasantly and does not interfere too much in state affairs.

In exchange for service, the sovereign distributes pieces of the national wealth. And those resources remain scarce—not only because of climate, geography, or history, but because the state itself works constantly to preserve its monopoly over wealth.

From its point of view, the ideal arrangement is one in which every benefit flows from a single source: the center. Everyone else must remain relatively weak, so that no alternative source of money, status, or power can ever begin to grow.

It is ideal when the state controls the export of furs and wax, and the production of vodka. It is ideal when the riches under the soil are sold to the West, and the state collects the rent. It is ideal when no one else is allowed to challenge that monopoly.

This is why mafia states so often produce laws that look irrational from the outside—laws that seem almost designed to manufacture poverty.

A classic example came after the Bolshevik Revolution, when Lenin, in the middle of a collapsing state, set out to destroy private enterprise that was still capable of feeding the cities. The result was not prosperity or justice, but real famine and mass epidemics. I write about this period in detail in my novel Russian Treasures, which follows the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet state.

And we can see the same logic at work now. The Russian state is not simply going mad as it damages its own economy. It is defending its monopoly over resources.

Once all wealth flows from one center, private property becomes largely ceremonial. In reality, major assets are not truly owned. They are handed to you to hold for as long as you remain in favor.

And this is why such a system is doomed to corruption.

If you are an official sitting on a river of public money, the rational thing to do is to steal at least part of it and move it somewhere safe. Because if the political winds shift, only money may help you survive the attack. And to avoid being caught, you need to place your own loyal people in every key position—not the people most capable of producing a technological breakthrough, but the people who will help you steal and erase the traces.

So it does not matter how many billions are poured into secret military research institutes. At the end of the process, you still get a Potemkin village. The dictator is shown a beautiful presentation. He becomes convinced that he commands “the second army in the world.” His propagandists convince the population of the same thing, and often even foreign journalists repeat it.

And then, when the test finally comes, it turns out not to be true at all.

That passage is taken from my new political thriller, The Snow Queen’s Spring, which I have just finished writing. The novel explores precisely these hidden mechanisms of authoritarian power: how people lie upward, steal sideways, and help reproduce a system that is slowly destroying them all. The book is now being prepared for publication, and if any publishers in Europe are watching, please do get in touch. I believe this novel can help explain what is happening inside Russia—and what a 21st-century system of international security would need to look like if threats from the East are ever truly to end.

Why the Cage Rebuilds Itself 

The important thing to understand is that, from the inside, a mafia state is extremely hard to change. It has established institutions of violence. It has habit. People know how to live inside a certain model, and so they keep reproducing it. And many of the old geographic constraints are still there as well.

That is why rebellion and revolution fail to break the system. They overthrow one version of it, only to rebuild another, sometimes on an even larger scale, as happened with the Soviet Union.

The mafia state itself will not voluntarily retreat from its monopoly.

The mineral wealth belongs to the state—which means, in practice, to the supreme ruler.

Taxes are collected for Moscow and redistributed by Moscow—which again means by the ruler.

The army and the security services answer to the ruler. So do the police, because police officers do not serve a local community. They serve the state. The state pays them, directs them, and controls their careers.

Thirty-three million people in Russia are non-working pensioners. Who pays their pensions? The state.

Altogether, more than half of Russia’s adult population receives money from the state and depends on it directly. For all of them, the collapse of the system would also mean the collapse of their personal income. And most have either no savings at all, or savings that are very small by Western standards.

But even those who do have savings are not truly independent. The state controls the banking system, and therefore controls the population’s money. If it wishes, it can restrict access to deposits or force citizens to buy government bonds, as it has already done more than once in Russian history.

So the cage is not held together by fear alone.

It is held together by salaries, pensions, licenses, promotions, bank accounts, and the  knowledge that almost every path to survival still runs through the same center of power.

The Monopoly on Reality

All of this could, in theory, be changed gradually—if people knew that alternatives existed.

But in reality, very few Russians understand that not all states are built the same way. A mafia state works constantly to convince its citizens that mafia is simply the natural condition of the world. Everyone steals. Everyone lies. There is no real difference between countries, only some mafias are more successful than others because they are cleverer at robbing fools.

This illusion is created through control of information and the deliberate distortion of how people see the world.

The first tool is censorship.

In the Russian Empire, censorship flourished, and writers lived under close surveillance. In the Soviet Union, it governed almost the entire intellectual life of the country. What censorship did not permit, for all practical purposes, did not exist.

Today, censorship no longer works quite as efficiently, although the authorities have spent years destroying independent media, driving writers into exile or prison, and arresting publishers who dare to pursue an independent editorial policy. I, for example, could not publish my new novel even on a Russian self-publishing platform, because the owners would risk prison simply for having “failed to notice” what I had written.

In the age of the internet, old-fashioned censorship is no longer enough. But the mafia has acquired new tools.

It can build troll factories that manufacture false public opinion and ignite furious arguments over nothing. It can flood the information space with a dozen contradictory explanations at once. It can lie openly wherever an ordinary person has no realistic way to verify the truth.

In the past, truth was hidden. Now, it is buried.

Unless you have spent years developing the new skill of finding reliable information, you may no longer be able to locate it at all.

The second tool is religion.

Russia was once an overwhelmingly religious country—first through Orthodoxy, then through the Soviet quasi-faith of communism, which in many ways grew out of older habits of belief. Religion no longer commands the masses as it once did, but two large groups still listen carefully to priests: pensioners and officials.

Mysticism is especially common among officials, because their lives do not depend primarily on merit or effort. They depend on miracle: on being noticed, protected, promoted, and spared. This is simply the world they inhabit.

Religion in Russia is fully subordinated to the state, and the regime watches the spiritual sphere closely to ensure that no independent source of authority begins to form there. For that, people can be sent to prison for many years.

The third tool is education.

It is divided by caste.

In large cities, officials want their own children to receive excellent educations, because they are not fools. They understand perfectly well how the world works. So elite schools can be very good.

Ordinary schools are another matter. They struggle with poorly qualified teachers, because ambitious and talented people rarely choose such low-paid work. Propaganda permeates everything. Critical thinking is absent. Children are taught that enemies surround them on every side and that their sacred duty is to die for the motherland, which in practice means dying for the desires of their superiors.

These children are being prepared in advance to be spent as a resource.

The situation is so bad that Russian internet pranksters regularly call teachers in small towns, pretend to be their bosses, and give them assignments. For example: read aloud to children a speech by Hitler in which only the place names and personal names have been changed, and record it on video.

And they do it.

Not because they are secret Nazis. Because they no longer recognize the difference—and, more importantly, they do not believe it is their place to recognize it. The will of the superior matters more than common sense.

The fourth tool is the monopoly on success.

A mafia state actively hunts people who achieve something outside the system, because success is also a resource. It creates authority. It proves that life beyond official favor is possible.

Scientists and cultural figures are pushed out of the country en masse and branded as foreign agents. They are harassed, denounced as traitors, stripped of assets, and in practice, deprived of property.

Singers and actors who refuse to support the war are denied stages and film roles.

If the target is a business, it can be seized outright or burdened with such restrictions that the owner is forced either to sell it for a pittance or reshape it according to the wishes of the state.

So the safest path is not excellence, but alignment.

Join the official structure. Repeat the approved words. Accept the rules of the cage.

Then, and only then, your success becomes real.

The fifth tool is isolation.

Here, the logic is exactly the same as in the family of a controlling tyrant. He cuts off his wife’s friends. He does not let her go anywhere alone. He monitors whom she speaks to, deprives her of independent income, and constantly frightens her with the claim that no one but him will ever love or value her.

And yes—he never stops talking about his love.

A mafia state does the same thing.

Most Russian children are prevented from receiving a truly useful education. English is taught so badly in most schools that, unless a child studies independently, the lessons are almost useless. Earlier this year, I spoke at a university in Copenhagen and was struck by how well everyone spoke English. Russia is nowhere close to that.

As a result, even Russians who travel abroad often remain inside their own separate little world. They do not really mix with the people around them, because they cannot. They may be able to order coffee, but they cannot discuss ideas, values, or the meaning of what they see.

And then the outside world begins, unwittingly, to help the Russian mafia do its work—by also pushing Russians back into their cage and making alternatives harder to reach.

The Kremlin’s central myth of Russophobia grew from exactly this soil: no one loves us, everyone wishes us harm, and therefore we must fight, close ranks, and defend our interests against a hostile world.

Europe itself has placed a weapon into the hands of Russian propaganda.

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