Those who oppose Putin and his war against Ukraine and the western world now make up about 20 per cent of Russians. A corresponding 20 per cent of Russians can be described as turbo patriots.

Andrei Kolesnikov, a Russian journalist and researcher designated a “foreign agent” since 2022, has, in spite of pressure, kept a mind of his own. Bravely remaining in Russia, he writes from “inside the belly of the beast” with all the risks to liberty and wellbeing that entails. In this, the latest in a series of excellent books by Russian dissidents published by Polity, he examines a nationalist imperialist ideology that was latent and “intuitive” through the 2000s, with roots deep in Russian history, and the accelerating stages by which Putin has hijacked Russian minds, explicitly formalising and imposing that ideology with systematic indoctrination.

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