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All the same, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who worked for more than a decade as a Kremlin adviser, Russia under Mr. Putin still reminds him of a sci-fi movie exoskeleton: “Inside is sitting a small, weak and perhaps frightened person, but from the outside it looks terrifying.”

‘The Ideology of the Future’

Russia’s economy is dwarfed by that of America’s, which is more than 10 times bigger in dollar terms; it is too small to make even a list of the top 10, and it grew by around just 1 percent this year. Nor does Russia pack much cultural punch beyond its borders, despite excelling in classical music, ballet and many other arts. South Korea, thanks to K-pop and its movies, has more reach.

Yet Russia has become a lodestar for autocrats and aspiring autocrats around the world, a pioneer of the media and other tools — known in Russia as “political technologies” — that these leaders now deploy, with or without Moscow’s help, to disrupt a world order once dominated by the United States. These include the propagation of fake or at least highly misleading news; the masking of simple facts with complicated conspiracy theories; and denunciations of political rivals as traitors or, in a term President Trump borrowed from Stalin, “enemies of the people.”

Whatever its problems, Mr. Surkov, the Kremlin adviser, said, Russia has created “the ideology of the future” by dispensing with the “illusion of choice” offered by the West and rooting itself in the will of a single leader capable of swiftly making the choices without constraint.

China, too, has advocated autocracy as the way to get results fast, but even Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, can’t match the lightening speed with which Mr. Putin ordered and executed the seizure of Crimea. The decision to grab the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine was made at a single all-night Kremlin meeting in February 2014 and then carried out just four days later with the dispatch of a few score Russian special forces officers to seize a handful of government buildings in Simferopol, the Crimean capital.