Increasingly, however, research has elucidated the ways that authoritarian leaders rule with the masses, rather than despite them.

The idea of the authoritarian citizen presents a conundrum for students of politics. Classical descriptions of autocracies see citizens as demobilized and controlled, and thus largely written out of the political equation. The idea that the power of a leader such as Vladimir Putin is co-constructed – that it is produced and reproduced simultaneously and continuously by rulers and ruled – only gets us so far, however, leaving unanswered important questions about how people interpret and navigate the political and social trade-offs inherent to life in authoritarianism, and why some people dissent.

This discussion will begin to re-open some of these questions from the bottom up, asking how and why Russian citizens come to understand power the way they do, and whether we need to revisit our own notions of authoritarian citizenship as a result.