PERCHED high above the Black Sea coast of Sochi and nestled in a coniferous forest stands a large and gloomy green house. It was once occupied by Joseph Stalin who had it built in 1937, at the height of the great terror which he had unleashed onto his country, and who would spend at least four months a year there, apart from the years of the second world war. After Stalin’s death the house served as a retreat for the leaders of the Soviet bloc countries. But now, in a fitting twist of fate, it is being transformed into an exclusive hotel owned by a secretive Moscow business group.

Sochi is also a favourite place for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who staged the 2014 winter Olympics there shortly before the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. A few months later Sochi hosted the Valdai club, a Russian answer to Davos, which was established in 2004 as a platform for informal meetings between foreign experts and Russian leaders. This year the meeting of the Valdai club began with a visit to Stalin’s dacha. Many participants saw it as a deeply symbolic gesture.

Compared with the lavish palaces of Mr Putin, the dacha is decidedly modest. Its only luxuries are a small cinema where the dictator watched Charlie Chaplin’s films, a tiny swimming pool, a billiard table and two large balconies. The visit hinted that in today’s Russia Stalin is seen not as a bloody tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions of his compatriots, but as a great statesman who had integrated the Soviet system into the Russian empire and had thus served as a model for Mr Putin.

The first question posed to members of the Valdai Club this year was: “What if the Soviet Union had not fallen apart?” Many of the Kremlin’s current policies, including its confrontation with the West, the war in Ukraine and in Syria and the way it has monopolised the economy, politics and the media seem like an experiment designed to answer that question. While most observers agreed that the Soviet Union had been doomed, Alexander Prokhanov, a devoted Stalinist and ideologist of state nationalism, said Russia was resurrecting itself as a symbiosis of the Tsarist and the Soviet empires.

A more revealing moment came in an exchange half in jest between Mr Prokhanov and Sheng Shiliang, a Chinese expert on Russia, who said in fluent Russian that the country was a good destination for Chinese tourists and an exporter of ice-cream enjoyed by Xi Jinping, China’s leader. Mr Prokhanov cringed. “If you had had Mikhail Gorbachev as your leader, China today would have been a good tourist destination for Russian tourists and we would be coming to Beijing to listen to Chinese opera,” he said bitterly.

In many ways Mr Putin’s regime is a velvet version of Stalinism—not least because Mr Putin has deliberately sought to rebuild the structures of the Soviet state. The secret service that had administered repression in Soviet days is once again the main tool of political control. Propaganda, the other main pillar of the Soviet regime, has also been lavishly restored. Victory has become Russia’s main ideology. The end of the second world war is once again presented as a triumph of Stalin’s leadership and state power, rather than a triumph of human values over fascism achieved by all allies. Memorial, an organisation set up in the late 1980s to exhume the crimes of Stalinism and the Soviet state, has been declared a “foreign agent”, a stigmatising label dug up from the Stalinist past.

But Russia as a society is very different from the Soviet Union. Although the revolution that took place 25 years ago has not produced strong institutions and the rule of law, it has yielded economic growth and personal freedoms unimaginable during the Soviet period. Russia today is an upper-middle-income country with an educated urban class that enjoys Western-style consumption and personal freedoms. But it is also a complex place with many contradictions, injustices and inequalities. It needs a pluralistic, flexible and modern political system.

This modern system has not been forthcoming. The Kremlin has tried to impose an archaic triad of nationalism, Orthodoxy and autocracy as well as confrontation with the West which can temporarily suppress problems but are unable to resolve them. Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of the economy, said the country did not need political change in order for its economy to grow, citing the example of Singapore.

Mr Putin’s restoration project means that Russia is once again faced with a survival challenge not dissimilar to the one faced by the Soviet Union a quarter of a century ago. Russian history is riddled with examples of politicians, thinkers and ideologists trying to rewind the tape of history back to the point where, in their view, the country took a wrong turn so they can try taking a different road as though no time had lapsed in between. This disrespect for reality and inability to deal with the present has served the country badly. By asking what would have happened if the Soviet Union had survived, Russian leaders are putting the country’s future at risk.