ack in February 2012, a month before Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation for the third time, his supporters released a YouTube video that indulged the desire of the tens of thousands of Muscovites protesting in the streets that winter. “The opposition is chanting, ‘Russia without Putin!’ ” the narrator says. “So let’s imagine that there is no more Vladimir Putin.” The immediate result, says the narrator, is elections, hundreds of parties, and the West praising the dawn of real democracy in Russia. But then the hypothesis gallops on through 2013: the rise of militant Russian nationalists, their clashes with Russia’s large Muslim population, nato troops in Kaliningrad, the Chinese in Khabarovsk, the Georgians in Krasnodar, and skinhead rule in St. Petersburg. A hungry winter, chaos and inter-ethnic violence, the departure of major international companies, and hyperinflation. The leaders of the opposition beg for asylum in the United States. By February 2014, there is no electricity, mobile service, or Internet in Moscow. Russians are advised to stay in their homes. “Russia without Putin?” the narrator concludes. “You decide.”

It’s extreme and, to a non-Putinist, even laughable; the sun will not stop shining if Vladimir Putin is no longer president. But this is a key part of the Putin worldview when it comes to both foreign and domestic affairs: There’s not much separating you, or anyone, from the void. And, ironically, it’s this fear of the future that keeps Putin in power. It’s a fear that’s not all that ridiculous when you consider that all of the footage illustrating the horrors of a Putinless future is the real footage of Russia’s recent past.