A quarter of a century has elapsed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and still we confront the problem of Russia. I write those words dispassionately, as if I were an outside analyst clinically twirling a globe. But as someone who carries both an American and a Russian passport, who has lived and worked in Russia, and who has friends and family there, I could just as easily turn the sentiment around: a quarter of a century after the end of Soviet totalitarianism, we Russians still face the problem of Russia.

Yes, many of the other former Soviet republics are hardly utopias—but they are also not angry expansionist powers with nuclear weapons and nervous neighbors. The Baltic states are by now fairly well integrated into Europe and the world economy. So is virtually all of Eastern Europe, which once was under Soviet sway. Most of these countries have made a transition to some form of democratic rule. Not coincidentally, most of them had a memory of such institutions to build on, as well as a thick and never-quite-eradicated weave of private, religious, and social groups—“civil society,” to use political-science jargon.

Russia lacks that memory, and civil society was largely supplanted by grim state-controlled substitutes over a period of seven decades. The years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union were full of contradictory events, including the explosive growth of civil-society institutions, but today’s Russia remembers the 1990s as an era defined by crime, corruption, chaos, political disarray, and economic despoliation—Lord of the Flies on a Eurasian scale. It is a measure of Russia’s distress that the ascendance of Vladimir Putin, a decade and a half ago, was greeted by many, inside and outside of Russia, with relief: at last a sober, serious man—even refreshingly bland, after the Boris Yeltsin circus—who might bring order to the country. But the order he brought was that of a mafia state. The apparatus of government is in the hands of a sprawling family-like structure that strives only to accumulate wealth and power. Free institutions wither on the vine or are strangled in the crib. Journalists and political activists are murdered with impunity. Foreign capital is fleeing. Leveraging nationalist fervor, Russia has annexed one part of Ukraine, invaded another, and hopes to make the rest of that country a docile satellite, in the meantime fueling a war by turns furious and festering. And Putin shows no sign of leaving office anytime soon. He poses shirtless for the cameras, as if to suggest his mastery over time itself. Next year, Russia will mark the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, meaning that for fully a century Russia has been conducting its gruesome experiment in violence against the minds, hearts, and bodies of its people. The following year, people who were born under Putin will have the opportunity to cast a ballot in a sham election, as his reign enters its 19th year. You have to wonder, as people inside and outside of the country do, what could possibly happen that would transform Russia from what it is into the “something better” it might become? Even if such a transformation were possible, you also have to wonder how long it would take, and who would have the patience for what is likely the work of decades, and may not get started for years.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Zurich, Switzerland, in December, 2014. By Gianluca Colla/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

The most influential Russian to ask these questions—and come up with answers, however plausible they may be—is today an exile from his native land. He is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia until, in 2003, he fell afoul of Putin and was stripped of his wealth and sent for a decade to a prison camp. Khodorkovsky was set free in 2013 as a cynical goodwill gesture, and promptly expelled from Russia. Reunited with his wife, Inna, and a daughter and twin sons, he spent his first year of exile in Zurich and then moved to London. I have talked with him a few times over the past two years, in New York, in Zurich, and in London. He now wears the look of a tech entrepreneur who has retired early. His stubble is longer than a five-o’clock shadow but shorter than his buzzed gray hair. He dresses casually, usually in black. For a while he spent his time shuttling between Zurich, where he maintained a sparse small office, and Prague and London, two cities with some of the highest concentrations of recent Russian exiles. Late last year, though, the Russians decided that they wanted him back behind bars and issued a warrant, so he has confined himself largely to London, where he is but one of many of Putin’s “wanted” men.

Nine months after his release, Khodorkovsky relaunched Open Russia, a foundation he had established in 2001. He was not the only oligarch to set up a foundation, but he was among the first, and his was by far the most actively political among them. Khodorkovsky’s vision in those days was optimistic verging on utopian. He had made his first fortune in his mid-twenties, by founding one of the Soviet Union’s first private banks. He made a far larger fortune in his thirties, using Russia’s desperate and corrupt privatization schemes to acquire what became the country’s largest oil company. Then he emerged from the 1990s, incongruously and perhaps prematurely, with the idea of transforming his businesses into transparent and civic-minded ones, and his country into one that relied on intellect and innovation rather than oil and mineral resources for its wealth. The original Open Russia funded civic initiatives, including media and educational organizations. After Khodorkovsky’s arrest the foundation was eviscerated—a major blow to civil society in Russia, which was heavily dependent on Khodorkovsky’s money.