When British journalist Marc Bennetts moved to Russia in the late 1990s, the country was still emerging from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. The period was chaotic, corrupt and economically brutal for many Russians — but it also carried a sense of political possibility.
In his new book, “The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness Under Putin,” Bennetts argues that possibility has been steadily crushed under Vladimir Putin’s rule.
"The Descent" is a firsthand account of Russia’s turn toward “totalitarianism, paranoia and madness.” Bennetts, a foreign correspondent for The Times and The Sunday Times, spent roughly 25 years reporting from Russia before leaving Moscow after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine amid growing security concerns following his arrest at an anti-war protest.
The book is both memoir and political diagnosis. Bennetts traces Russia’s path from the unstable freedoms of the Boris Yeltsin era to a state where dissent is punished, state television shapes reality for millions, and violence is increasingly justified in the language of patriotism. The account focuses heavily on propaganda — not simply as censorship, but as a system that overwhelms public life with grievance, conspiracy and hatred toward Ukraine and the West.
Bennetts draws on encounters with a wide range of Russians: pro-war politicians, Russian Orthodox Church figures, anti-war protesters, ordinary citizens and even a shaman who attempted to “exorcise” Putin. Those interviews are used to examine how Putin’s authority has been sustained not only by fear, but also by a cultivated sense of national humiliation and dependency. An uploaded briefing on the book describes this as a shift from the “chaotic freedom” of the 1990s into a “neo-totalitarian” system shaped by propaganda, repression and normalized state violence.
The war in Ukraine forms the book’s grim endpoint. Bennetts has reported repeatedly from wartime Ukraine, and his account connects Russia’s domestic transformation to the invasion — arguing that the assault on Ukraine was not an abrupt departure, but the result of years of authoritarian consolidation and imperial mythmaking.
Guest:
Marc Bennetts is a reporter for The Times who spent over two decades in Moscow. He is the author of “The Descent: Witnessing Russia's Spiral into Madness Under Putin.”
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