Even as late as the 1990s, one could sit with Russian intellectuals, amid all the political upheaval in those days, and they would talk intensely about the nature of the Russian soul. If it was dark in the kitchen at night, they wouldn’t just say, “Let’s replace the light bulb.” They’d talk for hours about how actually the root problem was the Russian soul.

Many of Russia’s most charismatic figures were on a lifelong search for purity. For the elder Tolstoy, you could live with material abundance and rot inside, or you could live the pure, simple rural life of the peasant. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “It makes me happier, more secure, to think … that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them.”

All of this spiritual ardor, all of this intense extremism, all of this romantic utopianism, all of this tragic sensibility produced some really bad political ideas. But it also produced a lot of cultural vibrancy that had an effect on the world.

While the rest of the world was going through industrialization and commercialism and embracing the whole bourgeois style of life, there was this counterculture of intense Russian writers, musicians, dancers — romantics who offered a different vocabulary, a different way of thinking and living inside.

And now it’s gone.

Russia is a more normal country than it used to be and a better place to live, at least for the young. But when you think of Russia’s cultural impact on the world today, you think of Putin and the oligarchs. Now the country stands for grasping power and ill-gotten money.

There’s something sad about the souvenir stands in St. Petersburg. They’re selling mementos of things Russians are sort of embarrassed by — old Soviet Army hats, Stalinist tchotchkes and coffee mugs with Putin bare-chested and looking ridiculous. Of the top 100 universities in the world, not a single one is Russian, which is sort of astonishing for a country so famously intellectual.

This absence leaves a mark. There used to be many countercultures to the dominant culture of achievement and capitalism and prudent bourgeois manners. Some were bohemian, or religious or martial. But one by one those countercultures are withering, and it is harder for people to see their situations from different and grander vantage points. Russia offered one such counterculture, a different scale of values, but now it, too, is mainly in the past.