Once he brings about truly modernizing reforms, people will supposedly follow willingly, forgetting centuries of serfdom, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the political chaos and economic free-fall of the 1990’s, and the decade of Putin’s managed democracy. But neither Khrushchev, nor Mikhail Gorbachev, nor Boris Yeltsin were able to uproot Russia’s stubborn culture of indifference and subordination, precisely because they insisted on top-down change and expected that the Russian people would simply acquiesce en masse.