So I am just writing a few words here not to defend him, but the explain a bit of modern Russian history. I am simplifying a lot and exclude various developments. In the end Putin is a horrible leader, but there is an argument that he is better than what came before.
The break-up for the UDSSR was brutal by every measure you can imagine. Probably only rivaled to the situation after WWI. So you have this extremely disruptive event, where the political, social and economic order collapses. I think it is difficult to comprehend just how disastrous the end of the UDSSR was, but that is necessary to understand modern Russian history.
The people who took over power implemented a relatively free market based democracy, but monopolized the resources at the same time. The voucher privatization and the way these people made their fortune during this period was extremely criminal. At the same time they failed to address the worst economic and social problems and it would take too much time to go into details. The gist is, that the people, already suffering from one of the worst crisis ever had fairly incompetent leaders, who enriched themselves in shameful ways (or more accurately: and alliance between political leaders and people who enriched themselves).
At the same time the west signalled fairly directly that they can’t help. Helmut Kohl said at the time (understandably), that the EU can be open to eastern Europe, but Russia is just too big. The same goes for NATO. So you have a country with on-going crisis, while their leaders living a decadent and decoupled life. My personal opinion is, that many of these reformers had little regard for their own citizens; they grew up in the context of the UDSSR, where they had to hide their own ideals and that influenced their opinion about “common people”, who they blamed in part for the whole mess. That is fairly controversial so. Yet it is well established that implementing free markets without political stability is an accident waiting to happen.
What you can see during the 90s is, that the background of the “elite” is shifting. The reformers who managed Russia in the early 90s were primarily economists, politicians and academics, During the 90 the amount of people with military, intelligence or police background skyrocketed. When Putin takes over about 70% of all the high level officials have such a background (nowadays it is imo +90%). When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So Putin comes into power and changes the character of the government. He embraces nationalism (vs liberalism/rule of law), autocracy (vs. democracy) economic interventions (vs free markets) and military power. The issue is, that he had success. The economic situation improves a lot and his military “adventurers” (aka wars) paid off (he used the military success to justify his rule from day1). In the end the experience of Russian’s with liberal democracy and free markets was nothing short of a disaster, while people experienced a massive improvement of their quality of life under Putin.
Now there is always the thing with causality and correlation. To some extend Putin was just lucky to take over at the right time, when the massive crisis, that followed the collapse of the UDSSR petered out. At the same time he also implemented some reforms, that played their part. Anyway, my impression is, that Russian’s associate a specific type of social order with the 90s (late 80s) and they want anything but that, because it was objectively horrible. Putin guarantees this and it is quite difficult to explain that liberal democracy and free markets were just a bastardization of these terms.
When was the last time from the last 1000 years they had leaders who cared about their own people?
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