Post-communist Russia and the particular regime of President Putin, his nationalism, his critical disdain and distrust of the West and his cynical skepticism towards the values ​​claimed as "Western", as well as the considerable consensus that all this has on Russian society, is not they understand without paying attention to the 1990s, the form and the reasons that led to the self-dissolution of the USSR by their own leaders, and the central feature that that decade imprinted on the social and national conscience of the Russians: humiliation.

That period was not only a great and traumatic depression for millions of Russians, but also offered the ideal environment for the social reconversion of an administrative caste in the owner class. Once this crucial operation was carried out, the question of the State was raised again in Russian elites: to recover its battered function and restore its prestige, both inside and outside the country.

Vladimir Putin, who, if he concludes his current mandate, will have ruled Russia for as long as Stalin or Brezhnev, was in charge of that restoration because he had three ideal characteristics: he was a loyal and obedient "order" person, not corrupt, with a sense of State and, at the same time, disillusioned with the ideologies of the former Soviet regime and unchecked any temptation to question the murky privatization that ended Soviet leveling and turned Russia into a society of great inequalities.

But all these amazing ups and downs of Russia on horseback between two centuries are also inserted over a concrete historical framework, a secular imprint that explains not a few inertia and returns to the traditional autocratic regime in Russia from its very foundation as a State.

This book addresses all these aspects and is, in some way, an epilogue and a return to the great chronicle that the author made fifteen years ago about the end of the USSR and the birth of post-communist Russia, The Great Transition (Russia 1985- 2002), which Manuel Vázquez Montalbán considered the best synthesis of that turbulent period.