The film presents this as a feat of sinister brilliance, in which the Kremlin ruthlessly manages reality itself. In doing so the movie conforms to a well-established genre: the glamorization of autocracy by Western intellectuals. The sordid, boring, vulgar and power-hungry bureaucrat is transformed into a Machiavellian prince. The film uncritically adopts the regime’s narrative about itself: that the Kremlin is a machine of cold-blooded sophistication, with tentacles in every corner of political life, and the opposition existing only when the puppet-master wills it to.

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What the movie cannot imagine is that the political machine it finds so intriguing might be a desiccated husk ravaged by decades of corruption. It gives us a Kremlin of great cunning even as the regime suffers the consequences of bad decisions by its purported wizards.

Take one such decision: the recent Yabloko fiasco. Yabloko is Russia’s oldest liberal party, founded in 1993. To call it anti-war would be an understatement. It is the only anti-war party. It opposed the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and is the only legally registered party in Russia to call for a ceasefire. But the last time the party had a representative in the State Duma was 1999. It got 1% of the vote in the 2021 election and has been politically irrelevant for a generation.

But in late July, Russia’s Election Commission approved Yabloko’s registration for the September elections. The party would run 269 candidates on its federal list and 135 in single-mandate districts under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom”. The Commission chair told reporters: “We treat everyone equally, and it’s up to voters to decide.” This was a startling claim to make when over the preceding months, authorities had fined 58 Yabloko members, raided five regional offices, detained 29 people, labeled 10 as foreign agents, and jailed six; 32 members had been barred from running under laws introduced after the invasion. The party had been harassed by every available instrument of the state, and then the state let it on the ballot anyway.

A source close to the Central Election Commission told a reporter that the logic behind the change was straightforward: give citizens a safe channel through which to express discontent. Better that unhappy voters mark a ballot for a small, manageable, long-neutered party than spoil their ballots or drift toward the Communists. The idea has a long pedigree in the study of autocratic regimes: semi-competitive elections serve as release valves and informational sources for rulers, a way to take the population’s temperature without loosening control over discourse.

But then something went wrong. Polls revealed Yabloko drawing real support, and some projections showed it could even win seats. A party that had been irrelevant since the last century had suddenly become a vehicle for anti-war sentiment that happened to be far greater than the Kremlin had anticipated. On 8 August, the nationalist party Rodina filed suit to have Yabloko removed from the ballot, and two days later, the Supreme Court agreed.

After more than four years of war, the managed opposition is no longer so easy to manage. Coverage of the ban has focused on what it tells us about the state of Russian civil liberties, but the more interesting question is what it says about the regime’s informational blinders. The Kremlin allowed an anti-war party onto the ballot, and the party turned out to be too popular. The regime built a pressure gauge, got a reading it did not expect, and smashed the gauge shut. This is not the behavior of an all-knowing puppeteer, but of someone increasingly ensconced in an informational bubble.

Why do autocrats even bother with allowing opposition parties or holding elections? Scholars who study the roles of elections in closed regimes have come up with several answers beyond “keeping up appearances”. Elections project strength and legitimacy to the population, co-opt elites, and provide a way to distribute patronage. Mexico’s PRI held elections for decades because the results told the party leadership which regional bosses were effective at delivering votes. In Mubarak’s Egypt, elections resolved internal conflicts over who got access to state rents.

But elections perform another key function for rulers: generating information about people’s actual preferences. Information is an artificially scarce resource for rulers, who face what scholars call the Dictator’s Dilemma. The same repression that keeps rulers in power cuts them off from honest information about what their people want. Fear induces silence, making it harder to anticipate unrest. Subordinates tell the ruler what he wants to hear. The security apparatus focuses on threats it has a bureaucratic interest in inflating. The ruler sits at the center of a system that keeps him ignorant of what’s really going on.

Elections are a way for rulers to manage the dilemma. By allowing a controlled opposition to contest seats, the regime creates a channel through which popular sentiment can register in a credible way. Yabloko’s registration was a textbook application of this logic. The Kremlin had a party that polled at 1% in the last election. It let the party run on an anti-war platform, expecting it to absorb a small, containable share of dissatisfied voters and produce a signal about public sentiment.

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The irony is that the Kremlin did get a signal, just not the one it wanted. It learned that anti-war sentiment was far larger than it had assumed. But it learned it in the worst possible way: through a public result it did not anticipate and could not contain, forcing a ban that advertised the regime’s miscalculation to everyone watching. The September election will now feature only parties that support the war, guaranteeing an uninformative result.

The Kremlin’s informational problems do not stop with the Yabloko incident. Analysis by ISW and the Financial Times suggests Russian generals are showing Putin maps of victories that did not happen. US intelligence reached this conclusion as early as March 2022, when officials said that Putin’s advisors were “too afraid to tell him the truth” about his military performance and the economic impact of sanctions. This was true four years ago; today the problem of informational isolation has only gotten worse.

An autocrat stumbling around an increasingly darkened room is both good and bad news. On the one hand, an uninformed autocrat makes bad decisions, which hastens the regime’s demise. There is evidence for this: Putin’s belief that he can take the Donbas by autumn, based on maps his generals have fabricated, may lead to operational choices that squander forces Russia cannot replace. And the fuel crisis is already straining a social contract built on the promise that war would not touch ordinary life. Another mobilization based on bad information would compound these problems.

On the other hand, ignorance may be a form of bliss for Putin. The cinematic wizard of the Kremlin manufactures a false reality for others, but his real-life counterpart is increasingly manufacturing a false reality for himself. A leader who is only being told what he wants to hear does not become more cautious as real conditions get worse. If the intelligence reaching Putin about his military position, his economy, and his population’s tolerance is as skewed as the evidence suggests, then his behavior becomes only more difficult to predict from the outside. The room might be getting darker, but that makes it ever more difficult to peep through its window.

Now, the queue is back, and this time the commodity is gas. In some regions, fuel for ambulances is running out; elsewhere the garbage trucks have stopped running; and, across the grain belt, farmers are heading into harvest without enough diesel for their combine harvesters. Russia now being a land of capitalism, a small-service economy has sprung up around the queues, with professional paid place-holders and crowdsourced maps showing which stations still have fuel. Yandex searches for “how to siphon fuel” are up more than tenfold. In one viral video, a man slowly pours gasoline into his lawnmower from a jerry can and deadpans: “What riches. Who can afford this now?”

Everyone knows the immediate cause: Ukrainian drones have spent months methodically pummeling Russian refineries.  The 10 largest have been hit this year, the latest attack coming only this week. Perhaps 40% of the country’s refining capacity is offline.

So the debate is not about the causes of the shortage but its consequences. What does this mean for the Russian regime? The optimistic reading is that this is the worst energy crisis of Vladimir Putin’s reign — and thus the beginning of the end. More cautious commentators point out that Russia has had similar gas shortages before, and that the whole thing remains, in macroeconomic terms, manageable.

Still, more revealing than the shortage itself is how the Kremlin has chosen to respond. Russian fuel prices are kept down by an elaborate subsidy apparatus, which pays refineries to sell domestically below market value. This costs the government a lot: two-and-half-trillion rubles last year (approximately £23 billion), roughly half the federal deficit.

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When you keep gasoline artificially cheap in the middle of a fuel shortage, obviously you will get huge lines at the pump. So why not loosen the prices, let them float upwards a bit to dampen demand?

The answer, until recently, is that while fuel shortages can be blamed on Ukrainian drones, higher gas prices will only be blamed on the regime itself. The Kremlin had faced a choice between higher prices or long lines — and has chosen the latter. Prices have generally crept up, but by less than cumulative inflation.

But that’s no longer a feasible choice. You learn a regime’s real priorities by what it clings to when it can no longer afford to — and the government held the price cap well past the point where it made sense. But over recent months, the strategy has begun to come apart: Russian retail petrol prices have jumped 20% in a year. In Crimean Sevastopol at the start of July, prices rose 30% in a week. Wholesale gasoline in European Russia is selling for roughly 1.5 times the official retail price.

So the regime did not, in the end, get long lines instead of higher prices. It got both. This was likely unavoidable, since past a certain point no subsidy conjures back a missing chunk of your fuel. But it highlights the difficult spot the regime has found itself in, with rising prices on top of the queue.

Neither higher prices nor long lines are popular. But of the two, the long line is the one that should keep Putin up at night, because of its dreaded public aesthetics. The Kremlin has spent years constructing a war that’s real but distant. Moscow life has proceeded as normal, and nearly all information about the war arrives pre-filtered. But this carefully managed veneer cracks a little more with every intrusion of the war into everyday life, whether it’s a refinery burning in Moscow’s outskirts or a long line of frustrated drivers on its roads.

Unpopular autocratic regimes survive by preference falsification; private doubts stay that way because every skeptic has to assume they’re alone, so they keep quiet. But the gas line is the opposite: a very public assembly of everyone privately doubting their government’s capacity to provide basic necessities. When RFE/RL reports that the shortage is “the only thing they’re talking about”, that should worry the Kremlin more than any capacity statistic, and surely explains why a ban on fuel exports has now been extended into 2027.

In a poll conducted this spring, even before the worst of the shortage, 60% of Russians said economic conditions were worsening. That’s a 20-year record. Trust in the military, in the government, and in election integrity all saw the largest annual declines ever recorded. The fuel crisis has arrived in a country already more anxious than at any point since the three-day “special military operation” began.

The US had its own fuel shocks in the Seventies, and it saw similar line-ups of frustrated drivers. Those too were a policy choice: President Nixon’s price caps turned the embargo shock into a shortage, following the same electoral logic. But an American waiting for gas in 1974 was suffering something new. A Russian in 2026 is watching a rerun of the bad old days, with all the visual markers of shortages and hoarding that Putin promised would never return. This was the deal he offered to Russians exhausted by the Yeltsin years: “stay out of politics, and I will keep the shelves stocked and your savings intact”. But the promise of predictability in exchange for a free hand, already damaged by the invasion, is now dissolving.

Even beyond the Soviet Union, Russia has been here before, with local gasoline crises made worse by peak summer driving seasons. Each faded by autumn. But this is different. The drones are getting through because Russia’s air defenses are being hollowed out by a methodical Ukrainian campaign against the radars and interceptors that once protected Russian refineries. The numbers are hard to confirm from the outside, but a careful look suggests Russia has been using up its interceptors faster than it can replace them, partly because it’s repurposing them into offensive missiles aimed at Ukrainian cities.

The American oil shocks of the Seventies had political consequences, sinking Jimmy Carter and helping give Ronald Reagan his victory in 1980. That queue’s political frustration had somewhere to go. But in Russia, Putin has spent a quarter of a century welding the release valves shut. That’s why the regime appears so worried about the September Duma elections. Senior officials floated postponing the elections due to the drone campaign, and one Duma deputy has warned that the fuel crisis will cost the ruling party seats.

“No remote e-voting or three days voting periods will save certain people,” she concluded gloomily. Despite all the carefully stage-managed results, there is only so much you can do to cover up spreading public dissatisfaction. You can falsify a ballot. But you cannot falsify the queue.

The 3.5 million pages released last week by the Department of Justice confirm that these are, in fact, the same story. Treating Russiagate as a case of isolated foreign interference or the Epstein revelations as a story of individual depravity are limiting and, strange as it sounds, comforting frames because they give each side a convenient villain.

The real story is more systemic. It rests on the emergence, from the ashes of the Soviet Union, of a transnational kleptocratic class that has grown to encompass Western elites too — many of whom are only too happy to collude with the Russians, the Saudis, the Israelis, whoever, in undermining democratic institutions. The Epstein Files need to be reframed: this is a story about modern geopolitics.

It should not be surprising that Russian names are all over the Epstein Files. Russia was the laboratory that birthed the modern transnational kleptocratic class. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created new oligarchs, as Soviet state assets were liquidated and former intelligence officers became freelance. But it also created a global template that opportunistic would-be Western oligarchs could follow in their turn.

The men who emerged from post-Soviet lawlessness — bespredel is the Russian term — built their fortunes by moving money across jurisdictions, leveraging kompromat, and treating governments as service providers instead of sovereigns. In this they were enabled by willing partners in the West, who provided the shell companies, the anonymous limited liability corporations, and the real estate loopholes. As Casey Michel has documented in American Kleptocracy, the US was not a victim of this corruption. Rather, it built the frameworks that enabled it.

Jeffrey Epstein appeared to understand this intuitively. He brokered connections across the worlds of Israeli intelligence, Gulf royals, European politicians, and the Russian state. One of his most frequent contacts was Sergey Belyakov, an FSB officer. Epstein helped Belyakov to locate tax havens and to evade sanctions; he also assisted in laundering the reputations of Russian intelligence officers, introducing them as legitimate businessmen to high-profile Americans to help them operate in the US without raising suspicion.

Russia’s former ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, was another recurring contact. He went to Epstein for advice on handling Trump. “Churkin was great,” Epstein wrote in June 2018. “He understood Trump after our conversations. It is not complex.” This was sent weeks before the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, where Trump sided with Russia, contradicting US intelligence. Epstein also pushed to meet Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, telling his frequent intermediary, former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland: “I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me.”

Epstein also promoted de-dollarization schemes like BRIC currencies and crypto, via his ties with US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. There were the inevitable honey-traps, too — he introduced Russian women to targets like Prince Andrew and Bill Gates.

There’s even a Silicon Valley dimension. One of his associates was Masha Drokova, a former commissar of the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi who later reinvented herself as a Bay Area venture capitalist. The files show she represented Epstein as a client and embedded Russian capital in the American tech sector through the same networks. An email from 2015 finds Epstein pitching Peter Thiel, chairman of the Palantir, in order to set up a meeting in Palo Alto with his “very good friend” Belyakov, who was organizing an “innovation conference in Moscow”. Epstein had previously facilitated meetings between Thiel and Churkin. The connection between Palantir’s surveillance capabilities and Moscow’s interests was framed as just another networking opportunity among friends.

The British dimension is equally revealing. Lord Mandelson, the “Prince of Darkness” who was a key architect of New Labour, appears throughout the files as a willing conduit between Whitehall and Epstein’s network. While serving as Business Secretary during the 2008 financial crisis, Mandelson forwarded internal government communications to Epstein — including advance notice of the €500 billion bailout and discussions about selling off UK government assets.

This behavior tracks with Mandelson’s broader cultivation of Russian kleptocracy. He vacationed on the yacht of aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, whose company benefited from tariff cuts that Mandelson oversaw while serving as EU Trade Commissioner. Mandelson’s firm later leveraged these ties to lobby the Kremlin directly, with Mandelson even writing to Putin to intervene in a dispute involving a Russian defense conglomerate on whose board he sat. Mandelson also offered to secure a Russian visa for Epstein using his backchannel to Deripaska. In November 2010 — when Epstein was already a convicted pedophile — he emailed Mandelson asking for a workaround to get a last-minute Russian visa. Mandelson replied the next day, confirming that he had an associate “helping on visas” to expedite the paperwork.

As we’ve known for a while, a lot of the Russiagate revelations turned out to be completely true — despite being labeled cringe lib paranoia. Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort really was colluding with the Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik. I’ve had an interest in this subject for some time, arguing in 2017 that the collusion was a byproduct of long-standing financial schemes. The protagonist was not Putin but the money itself.

At a certain point it began to feel like shouting into the void. People were so fixated on the overhyped effects of Russian troll farms that they forgot that the source of the problem, as usual, is not anonymous shitposters but the people in charge. As David Klion argued years ago, the Steele dossier spy-thriller framing of Russiagate was a distraction; the Left should have treated the scandal as a means to critique global capitalism — rather than a pretext to leap to the defense of the FBI. We can have a debate over how much Russia influenced the 2016 election, but this is a bit of a red herring; in any case, the shady links were there years before Trump developed political aspirations.

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I suspect one of the reasons Epstein was able to coast for so long is that many sensible people — especially educated liberals — found the idea of viewing the world through a conspiratorial lens vaguely distasteful and rube-coded. The liberal epistemic style has a strong allergy to connecting the dots, partly as a reasonable response to growing paranoid thinking on the Right — but also as a class marker. Baroque patterns of elite coordination became associated with Glenn Beck’s chalkboard. As Thiel wrote to Curtis Yarvin in 2014, “one of our hidden advantages is that these people” — he meant the progressive Left —  “wouldn’t believe a conspiracy if it hit them over the head…Linkages make them sound crazy, and they kinda know it.”

Epstein’s case seems almost designed to exploit this blind spot. The actual facts sound like QAnon fever dreams, which made the serious people instinctively skeptical, because believing it pattern-matched to believing nonsense. The deeper issue is that educated liberals tend to have high trust in institutions and credentialed expertise. The idea that prosecutors, academics, and journalists might all fail simultaneously due to social pressure, career incentives, or willful blindness cuts against the assumption that these systems basically work.

But if liberals were guilty of an anti-conspiratorial reflex, the Right bears responsibility too, for flooding the discourse with QAnon fever dreams, anti-vaccine hysteria, and stolen election fantasies. When everything is portrayed as a conspiracy, the term loses its sting. The tools that might have exposed Epstein’s network earlier — investigative journalism, institutional accountability, the rule of law — are precisely the liberal inheritance that the post-liberal Right treats with such contempt.

Connect the dots and the files do highlight connections that span decades and resurface in unexpected places. In a 2019 email Epstein flagged a “coincidence”: the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for more than twice what Trump paid for it four years earlier. Rybolovlev never occupied the property before demolishing it. He was the same man who sold a Leonardo da Vinci painting to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for $450 million — a price that Epstein claimed was absurdly inflated. As Epstein noted, Rybolovlev “knows all”.

Last year, Rybolovlev appeared as part of Russia’s delegation in the Ukraine peace talks held in Riyadh, sitting across from Trump’s team. Just to be clear: the same man apparently involved in laundering money through a Trump real estate deal is now helping to negotiate the end of Europe’s largest war. One of the most spiritually exhausting elements of all this is that it’s impossible to discuss such things without sounding like a conspiratorial lunatic. But here we are.

As for Trump himself, Epstein described him in the emails as “the dog that hasn’t barked” — someone who knew all but stayed silent. Lutnick appears throughout as an obsequious dinner companion and fundraiser contact. William Barr, who repeatedly appears in the files, unilaterally cleared Trump of Russiagate charges in 2019. He was also Attorney General when Epstein died in federal custody. His father had given Epstein his first job at the Dalton School decades earlier.

But it wasn’t just Trump cronies. Kathryn Ruemmler, counsel to the White House under Barack Obama, wrote that she “adored” Epstein. Bill Gates met with Epstein repeatedly after his conviction for pedophilia. Bill Clinton flew on his plane. Noam Chomsky offered him advice. Larry Summers took his money.

The Russian collusion story was never about shadowy foreign forces assaulting an innocent democracy. This lets the US off the hook too easily. It was about a sphere of elite impunity. American consultants, Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, European politicians, Israeli intelligence figures and British ex-spies all swim in the same waters.

Abstracted from the lurid details, Epstein and Russiagate are two manifestations of the same phenomenon. Epstein was a node in that global infrastructure and Russiagate was one operation that ran through it. You don’t need an elaborate conspiracy if you have lots of power and similar concerns.

Russia wants to weaken Western institutions and will pay for it. The borderless elite profit from weak institutions and enjoy getting paid. Their interests converge. At a certain altitude, the lines on the map disappear.

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A version of this article first appeared on Hegemon.