By the time Vladimir Putin began his first term as president of Russian, in early 2000, most analysts were lamenting the demise of Russian civil society. In late 2011, as he prepared to return to the Kremlin for a third term, the same analysts were surprised by the resurgence of grassroots protest. A narrative expressed in terms of success and failure, relying on a normative vocabulary and static analytical concepts, cannot, I argue, make sense of that progression. A more coherent narrative –which this article attempts to present– would look to concepts of interaction, in which citizens and the state are seen as constituting one another through a complex series of social and political engagements. Such a narrative, moreover, must not begin in 2000, but must look further back into history, elucidating the co-evolution of Soviet and then post-Soviet state and society over the past twenty years. In this view, then, the decline of civil society in the 1990s can be seen as accompanying the disintegration of the institutions of state-society interaction, while the reemergence of civic activism in more recent years comes hand in hand with the consolidation of authoritarian governance.