How does the perceived decline of legitimacy reshape the meaning and effectiveness of soft power? While traditional accounts—from Joseph Nye’s foundational theory to Janice Bially Mattern’s critiques—frame soft power as either voluntary attraction or discursive coercion, they neglect how legitimacy’s collapse fundamentally transforms soft power’s meaning. I advance a constructivist theory of soft power reinterpretation, arguing that legitimacy is constitutive of soft power — when legitimacy erodes, attraction is not just weakened, but redefined through distrust and disrupted cultural resonance. When legitimacy fractures, cultural tools—media, language, and historical symbols—do not simply lose appeal: they are reconstituted as instruments of domination and resisted as propaganda. Drawing on my original fieldwork in Armenia (December 2024–January 2025) on Russia’s declining soft power in the country—which included 31 semi-structured interviews and 252 survey responses—and supplementing this with discourse analysis, I demonstrate how geopolitical abandonment triggered a widespread recoding of Russian cultural influence from fraternal to coercive. Armenia’s democratic shift and pluralistic media environment accelerated this reversal, transforming soft power into a site of contestation. My theory reframes soft power as relational and contingent, demonstrating that when legitimacy collapses, attraction itself is socially reconstructed as coercion. This insight extends beyond Russia, offering a new framework for analyzing how global powers face not just decline but reversal of influence when moral authority breaks down.