Among Western commentators there have been 2 main takes on Vladimir Putin:
He is mostly rational, and his actions are calculated (for instance, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy say this)
He is mostly an irrational, violent thug (for instance, Masha Gessen says this)
Both of these takes combine to suggest that Putin’s hold on power is weak. So I’m going to pull some quotes from these writers, and consider how their past observations inform us now, after 2 years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But first, on the question of when Putin might lose power:
It’s a well established rule that authoritarian regimes appear to be invincible till the moment they admit they must negotiate with the opposition, at which point chaos is unleashed. Up until that moment, outsiders cannot see what the regime is doing to maintain its power. Even the insiders typically have no idea why other insiders are still loyal to the system, indeed, part of the inertia of the system is that no group of insiders wants to move against the system when they are uncertain how other insiders will react. I’ll here repeat a quote that I’ve used before:
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Vol 4
By Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter © 1986
Democracy institutionalizes uncertainty, not only with respect to the persons and groups who will occupy positions of authority, but also with respect to the uses to which authority will eventually be applied. In a sense, the transition to political democracy sets up the possibility of another transition. For the citizenship principle of equal treatment in matters affecting collective choices knows no intrinsic boundaries, except those set, at a given moment, by tradition, received wisdom, explicit agreement, or countervailing power.
…Typically, at the beginning of the transition the soft-liners within the regime have a strong hand in relation to the opposition, the more so to the degree that they feel successful in having attained past goals. Their ace in the hole is the threat that if the opposition refuses to play according to the rules they propose initially – usually a modest liberalization confined to individual rights and a restricted democratization with tight limits on participants and a narrow agenda of permissible policy issues – they will simply cancel the game and return to the authoritarian status quo ante. This tends to weaken and divide the proponents of further democratization.
Some activists will believe in the threat of a hardline coup and, preferring to avoid the worse outcome, agree to play the soft-liners’ game. Others prefer the risk of a showdown to accepting such a self-limited outcome. But, despite the initial strengths and intentions of the soft-liners their hand will eventually be recognized for the bluff that it has become. What forces the cards to the table is the growing evidence that, if a coup does indeed occur, the hard-liners will not only have to repress the regime’s opponents but will also have to overthrow the soft-liners within its ranks.
…When conflicts and “disorder” reach their zenith, the hard-liners’ worst fears may be confirmed, and their capacity to recruit “fence-straddlers” increases. Then the conditions seem favorable for the coup that would produce the feared authoritarian regression. This is when the soft-liners are forced, for the reasons already noted, to reveal their predominant interest in preventing such an outcome. On the other hand, the greater the mobilization and protest of the opposition, the more obvious to the promoters of the coup that more extensive and systematic repression will be necessary. This implies not merely returning to the status quo ante but to some very extreme version of authoritarian rule, in which, quite obviously, the soft-liners will lose their present position. The hard-liners may not have serious objections to applying the kind of repression that such authoritarian regression implies.
What is surprising and noteworthy is that Putin himself has played the role of soft-liner and hard-liner. I don’t mean that he was actually a soft-liner, but he did pretend to be. Since he was first promoted to power, at the end of 1999, by Yelstin, Putin has pretended to be many different things. Why is this? Is this merely a strategy for disarming his opponents? Perhaps he pretends to be less dangerous than he actually is, in the hopes of lulling his targets to sleep? Or does he need to do this because his position is weaker than we know?
Consider this:
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution
Putin has appeared in an endless number of guises for encounters with the press or Russian special interest groups, or at times of crisis, as during raging peat bog fires around Moscow in 2010, when he was transformed into a fire–fighting airplane pilot. All this theatricality is done with the assistance, it would seem, of the Kremlin’s inexhaustible wardrobe and special props department.
~~
Vladimir Putin and his PR team – which closely monitors the public reactions to the Mr. Putin episodes – are aware that these performances lack universal appeal and have sparked amusement at home and abroad because of their elaborate and very obvious staging. This has led people to depict him as a shallow, cartoonish figure, or a man with no face, no substance, no soul. Putin is often seen as a “man from nowhere,” who can appear to be anybody to anyone.
But Russian intellectual elites, the Russian political opposition to Mr. Putin, and overseas commentators are not his target audiences. Each episode of Mr. Putin has a specific purpose. They are all based on feedback from opinion polls suggesting the Kremlin needs to reach out and create a direct personal connection to a particular group among the Russian population.
All of which raises the question, how much power does Putin really have? If he has absolute power, then why does he need these endless performances, based on endless opinion polling? If he is worried about losing power, how does he imagine that he will lose power? Does he feel that he can only dominate the oligarchs and the military and the intellectual elites for as long as he is seen as popular? Does he have any rivals? Does he have the power to kill all of his potential rivals? What about the FSB, his power base? If he faced a rival from inside the FSB, does he have the power to kill that rival?
Perhaps this is why the invasion of Ukraine is so dangerous for him:
Putin himself has asserted in biographical interviews that one of his main skills is to get people – in this case the Russian people, his audience(s) – to see him as what they want him to be, not what he really is. These performances portray Putin as the ultimate Russian action man, capable of dealing with every eventuality.
For a moment in 2022 it seemed we were finally seeing the real Putin, without any act: a fascist dictator bent on world domination. For many in the West, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended all of the speculation about Putin. We no longer felt confused about the hybrid authoritarian-but-open-semi-tolerant society he’d built. In response to the war, and especially in response to the defeats that Russia has suffered, Putin has converted Russia into a more traditional type of dictatorship. For those of us in the West, it is almost reassuring to now deal with a kind of government that we have long experience with, rather than some strange new hybrid.
But can Putin actually run a typical dictatorship? If so, why did he previously jump through so many hoops to remain popular? Does he still face any popular pressure? Has he lost something essential, when he gave up on the relatively open-to-the-world society that he ran for 22 years?
What should we make of this:
It is important to realize that there is something deeper, more complicated at work beneath the façade of the “Mr. Putin” performances, something that an outside observer will always find hard to grasp. Each of the guises that Putin adopts, and the actions he undertakes, pays a degree of respect to a certain group and validates that group’s place in Russian society.
That is certainly possible. And perhaps his power will slip if the Russian people begin to feel disrespected. However, another possibility is clear: that Putin demands to be loved universally, and this is what he sees as his part of the performance. That is, perhaps he only performs for groups who he thinks will love him. By contrast, a group that dislikes him, in some determined way, faces prison.
There are two possible explanations for “The Mr Putin Show.”
he is a narcissist who loves the attention
he needs to demonstrate respect for various demographics in Russia, or he would lose power
The Russian opposition writer Masha Gessen writes of Putin in a way that would suggest he is motivated by his own narcissism, more than anything else.
Surviving Autocracy
By Masha Gessen
Copyright © 2020
Page 31-33
We imagine the villains of history as masterminds of horror. This happens because we learn about them from history books, which weave narratives that retrospectively imbue events with logic, making them seem predetermined. Historians and their readers bring an unavoidable perception bias to the story: if a historical event caused shocking destruction, then the person behind this event must have been a correspondingly giant monster. Terrifying as it is to contemplate the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it would be even more frightening to imagine that humanity had stumbled unthinkingly into its darkest moments. But a reading of the contemporaneous accounts will show that both Hitler and Stalin struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education, and imagination – and, indeed, as being incompetent in government and military leadership. Contrary to popular wisdom, they were not political savants, possessed of one extraordinary talent that brought them to power. It was, rather, the blunt instrument of reassuring ignorance that propelled their rise in a frighteningly complex world.
Contemporary strongmen, because we watch their ascent in real time, retain their more human outlines. We witnessed the greed and vanity of Silvio Berlusconi, who ran Italy’s economy into the ground. We recognize the desperate desire of Putin to be admired or at least feared – usually literally at his country’s expense. Still, physical distance makes villains seem bigger than they are in real life. Just as the full absurdity of Trump was sinking in, crushing any hope that he would turn “presidential,” Putin, in the American imagination, was turning into a brilliant strategist, a skilled secret agent who was plotting the end of the Western world. In fact, Putin was and remains a poorly educated, under-informed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world. To the extent that he has any interest in the business of governing, it is solely his own role – on the world stage or on Russian television – that concerns him. Whether he is attending a summit, piloting a plane, or hang gliding with Siberian cranes, it is the spectacle of power that interests him. In this, he and Trump are alike: to them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics – and public politics is only the performance of power.
It's possible Putin craves adoration, and “The Mr Putin Show” is part of the way he demands it — these different roles he performs are actually roles he wants to believe about himself. It's possible he loves the spectacle even more than his audience loves it. And it is possible that he wants to believe he is the hero that he pretends to be. But if that’s true, then he is weaker than we previously knew — if he lives in his own fantasy world, then he suffers the weakness of not understanding reality.
There are many in Russia who hate Putin. A whole world of rage is hidden from us most of the time. The few times that Putin allowed an unscripted encounter between himself and the public, the results were a disaster for Putin:
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution
In her book, Masha Gessen describes a very similar interaction with a hostile crowd during what was essentially Putin’s first experience of dealing with a crisis and major public relations disaster as president – the so-called Kursk incident. In August 2000, one of Russia’s nuclear submarines, the Kursk, caught fire after an explosion and sank with all hands on board in the northern Barents Sea. Survivors of the blast were trapped underwater for several days as Russia rebuffed international offers of assistance in attempting a rescue. By the time rescuers reached and penetrated the submarine, the group of survivors were long dead. Throughout what became a very public Russian and international vigil for the Kursk sailors, Putin was conspicuously absent. Initially he was on vacation, then he resisted entreaties to go to the site of the disaster. Gessen recounts the story, as told by Russian journalist Andrei Kolesnikov in his book on Putin, Ya Putina videl! (I saw Putin!). Quoting from Kolesnikov, Gessen notes that Putin’s then presidential chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and others had to work extremely hard to persuade Putin to travel to the Barents region to meet with the Kursk wives, mothers, and families. He finally traveled there ten days after the accident and also arrived four hours late to the designated meeting. Using Kolesnikov’s first-hand account, Gessen relates – just as the narrator posting the July 2010 YouTube video did – that people were screaming at Putin, telling him to “Shut up!” and asking why he took so long to ask for help. Gessen writes: “Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster – and there would be many in his tenure as president – would Putin allow himself to be pitted publicly against the suffering.
Russia is full of many, many groups who have been hurt by Putin. And now, after invading Ukraine, after two years of war, there are even more groups, with profound reasons for hating Putin. When Putin is finally overthrown, this rage will be made public, and then it will seem obvious, in retrospect, that (of course! so obvious!) the Russians wanted to see Putin destroyed.
We should not ever doubt how many of them hate Putin. But they are afraid, and so they stay silent. They also hate themselves for their own cowardice, and when they finally have their chance, they will take their revenge on Putin for proving them to be cowards.
It remains a question: does Putin see it this way? Is he afraid? Does he believe that the average Russian loves him, or hates him?
Unlike Masha Gessen, some feel that Putin is motivated by a rational calculus. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy make this argument for the endless spectacles that they refer to as the “Mr Putin Show.”
(Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy)
But Putin is not out to win votes. He is running a country. His actions have more in common with the leaders of traditional societies than Western leaders. Hamid Karzai, when leader of Afghanistan from 2004 to 2014, for example, frequently told his Western interlocutors that contrary to their interpretations of democracy, he understood democracy to be rule by consensus, not by majority.
Is it true that Putin needs to build consensus? Governing by consensus is a weak kind of government. He seems to have started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in defiance of the advice of his own advisors. Has he outgrown consensus government? Perhaps it was only necessary during the years that he was still consolidating his power, but it is not necessary now? But we should also wonder: those groups that he used to listen to, how do they feel now? Those groups that he used to demonstrate respect for, do they feel disrespected now? What would it take for them to react to the disrespect?
Were his antics ever about showing respect for various ethnic groups? Perhaps he was simply doing it to satisfy his own ego? Or perhaps the audience for the Mr Putin Show is not the ethnic groups he visits, but the wealthy professionals back in Moscow? Perhaps that is the only group that Putin actually feels the need to keep loyal? The same group of affluent professionals who went wild with joy when he took Crimea?
One thing is certain: in launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was hoping to recapture the popularity that he enjoyed in 2014. But why was he afraid of his loss of popularity? Did he think someone was going to replace him because he was unpopular? If so, how long can the war grind on before the war makes him even more unpopular than the previous situation, which the war was supposed to solve for him?
About this:
(Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy)
Similarly, Putin has stressed on several occasions that he considers listening to the Russian people and hearing what they have to say in person as part of his duty as head of the Russian state. He has traveled extensively to Russia’s far–flung regions over the course of his presidencies and during his time as prime minister and devised an array of forums for meeting with and hearing from the public. In an impromptu 2012 meeting with Russian–American journalist and author Masha Gessen, Putin also claimed that most of the costumed stunts were his own idea and not his staff’s.
Putin has clearly gone downhill, a great deal, over the last 10 years. I mean that he's gone downhill mentally, but also that he must feel his position has weakened. It is impossible to imagine him now granting an interview with Masha Gessen. He lacks the confidence. In 2012 he still felt he could offer an unscripted and spontaneous interview to a journalist who was known to be hostile to him. There is no possibility that he would do that now. Instead, he invites Tucker Carlson, a known sycophant, to come to Russia to interview him. This, too, suggests weakness.
Let’s remember the historic luck that Putin once had, especially in the early days: he took over in 2000 and the price of oil went up, which allowed him to stabilize the Russian economy. The Russians loved him, for awhile. They gave him credit for saving the economy, even though it was mostly the rising price of oil that had actually saved the economy. But Western commentators agree, if his re-election had been fair, in 2004, he probably would have won it. As it was, he cheated, because cheating is endemic in Russian culture, but if he had not cheated, he still would have won.
The Crimean Nexus
Putin’s War and the Clash of Civilizations
Copyright © 2017 by Constantine Pleshakov
Page 47
Vladimir Putin had appeared, seemingly from nowhere, in 1999. The first foreign leader to be told of his appointment as prime minister of Russia, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, reported it this way to Bill Clinton: “The replacement that was mentioned to me was some guy whose name is Putin.” Russians shared his bewilderment. On the day Yeltsin introduced Putin as his designated successor, few Muscovites knew who he was. When interviewed, they referred to the new leader of the country as someone whose name “started with a P.”
Putin’s eventual popularity with the Russian Main Street came from two sources. One was his claim to limit the power of the oligarchs, kick them out of politics, and restore Russia’s “vertical of power,” a euphemism for strong state. Another was completely accidental. During the Yeltsin years, the price of crude oil on world markets had fallen as low as $10 a barrel, sending the newly independent Russian nation into bankruptcy. In Putin’s first year in office, the price of crude skyrocketed, filling the coffers of the state treasury and allowing many government offices that had become almost moribund for lack of funds to begin functioning again. Putin was able to claim credit for reviving the state, government workers were once again being paid, and money trickled down to the people. Russia paid off the last of its foreign debt in 2006, and in 2008, when crude oil crossed $100 a barrel, it could boast almost $800 billion in foreign reserves. As Stephen Weisman noted in the New York Times in 2006, a “more assertive Russia” was back, and the United States was not “welcome to set up shop in the old Soviet empire.”
A brilliant success: that was how the Russians saw Putin during the early years. Later on, they turned against Putin, there were massive riots against Putin in 2011, but he was able to rescue his popularity in 2014, when he seized Crimea. Without question, this was the single most popular thing he ever did.
In the winter of 2011-2012, Moscow saw a tide of spontaneous grassroots protests. The authorities managed to overwhelm it bloodlessly, and Russian voters put Putin in the Kremlin for a third term (officially, he got 63.6 percent of the vote, but even if the election was rigged, no poll or estimate puts his actual support below 55 percent). In Putin’s “managed democracy,” Russian living standards were possibly better than they had ever been (in 2013, 56 percent of Russians between the ages of eighteen and forty-five vacationed abroad). Yet the 2011-2012 protests signified the end of national accord. That had to be restored, and a “little victorious war” could do it.
Despite his efforts to show respect for different groups in Russia, or perhaps because of the narcissism that causes him to demand so much attention, Putin is often out of step with Russian society. But seizing Crimea was unique. That appealed to a dream very much in the hearts of most Russians. As Putin said afterwards “Russia has risen from its knees,” and the people rejoiced.
Page 143-145
After the annexation, the Russian middle class fell into a strange euphoria, turning a blind eye to the diplomatic, financial, and political costs of Putin’s Crimean Reconquista. Flights to the peninsula were overbooked: people felt moved to support the region’s economy. #CrimeaIsOurs became the hashtag of Russian social networks.
Basking in popularity, Putin interpreted the future of Crimea casually, giving simple answers to difficult questions. Russia had just developed Sochi, with its expensive hotels empty since the 2014 Winter Olympics; now it had to fill another resort in the face of the world’s disapproval. Putin dismissed the problem, saying that Sochi would be for the “moneyed” and Crimea for the “ordinary people.” Plans were made to open casinos, to turn Crimea into a Russian Las Vegas. But very quickly, Crimeans realized that the bright future promised by Moscow was far away, if it was to come at all.
The point of contrast was the 1980s and 1990s when the old system had collapsed. Every Russians who remembered the chaos and poverty of the 1990s was thrilled to think that Russia could regain some of its former strength.
Let’s be realistic: Russia will never be as strong as the USSR. Between 1920 and 1940 the USSR expanded from 8% of world GDP to 18% of world GDP. Right now Russia constitutes just 1.5% of world GDP. Russia under Putin is a pale shadow of what it once was. But when he conquered Crimea, Putin convinced the Russians that they had fully recovered from the horror of the 1990s.
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
[During the 1990s] One narrative among the Russian political and intellectual elite in this period – both inside and outside government – was that the Russian state had fallen into another time of troubles (smutnoye vremya). This is the narrative that Putin adopted when he embarked on his presidency in 1999–2000.
The smutnoye vremya ended, but in a manner that ensured Russia should continue forward with its cursed fate, till the next horrific incident. Nations are run by systems, and these systems often demonstrate high levels of momentum — meaning that they resist changing direction. And somehow Russia re-created the feudalism and tyranny that has been such a large part of its history.
By the 1980s, the growing independence of various USSR bureaucrats was already transforming the USSR into an oligarchy. As the central government grew weak, the individual bureaucrats who controlled thousands of farms, or perhaps a hundred tractor factories, were increasingly operating as independent entities. They were well positioned to seize ownership of the factories they already controlled. Anyone who wanted to foster entrepreneurship in Russia would have broken up these vast holdings, and perhaps converted them into either worker cooperatives or smaller, private companies. But instead, Yelstin decided to grant full ownership to the largest thieves, who now became actual oligarchs. This was one of the stupidest experiments in all of history:
On January 1, 1992, President Yeltsin launched an ambitious economic reform program intended to transform Russia’s inherited Soviet economy into a modern market economy. The approach, labeled “shock therapy,” was modeled on the recent experience of transition in Poland and other former communist countries. The key steps included the abolition of central planning for manufacturing and other production, the privatization of government enterprises, rapid liberalization of prices, and stark budget cuts aimed at restoring fiscal balance. For a Russian population that for decades had known only fixed prices, lifetime employment guarantees, and a cradle–to–grave welfare system, there was no doubt about the shock. Since virtually all prices were deregulated at the same time, they predictably jumped to unprecedented levels in one single leap. Accumulated household savings were rendered worthless. There were no provisions for compensation by the government. Enterprises were left without government orders. Their directors had neither the time nor the skills to find alternative customers before they had to simply shut down production. Unemployment soared.
As I’ve said previously, the Soviet system could have reformed itself in the same way the Chinese system did, and Gorvachev certainly advocated for Chinese style reforms, but the resistance he met was incredible (see previous posts for details). The greatest mistake of the 1990s was thinking that the new reforms had to be introduced as a "shock" when in fact it was the "shock" speed of the reform that doomed the whole effort. Given time, a new generation of business leadership would learn how to run for-profit businesses, but given the shock treatment meant that large parts of the economy fell into the hands of those with the political connections needed to keep those businesses going in the short-term. The very thing that Western economists thought would "de-politicize" the economy was the thing that kept it political. And therefore Russia remained the kind of country that could be governed by a man like Putin.
[In 1993] Putin’s then boss, Anatoly Sobchak, however, was one of the key drafters of the new Russian constitution. This would prove to be one of the most consequential documents for defining Putin’s future presidency.
This might explain Putin's refusal to ask for a new constitution. Although he constantly violates the spirit of this constitution, he generally obeys the nominal, outermost sketch that it imposes on him. For instance, he still holds elections, though he manipulates them. Hopefully no one thinks I'm suggesting that he's loyal to constitutional rule, I'm simply struck by the fact that he's never torn the thing up and openly said "I am now dictator of Russia." He continues to insist that he is obeying the law. We should ask why he feels the need to say this. Who is his audience? Who believes him? If he openly tore up the constitution, who would rebel?
The Russian presidency enshrined in the constitution far exceeded even the U.S. and French equivalents in its sweep of authority.
Why concentrate so much power in the hands of the President? It allowed Yelstin to rule with a heavy hand. We can imagine this seemed like an escape from the political paralysis of the late Soviet period, yet in the grand historical sweep, this very much represents a step backwards, to go from a society, under the USSR, that was governed by a series of committees, to become a society governed by the edicts of one person.
Here on Demodexio we will soon review Christopher Clark’s book, The Sleepwalker’s. Clark suggests that the era when one person could rule a country ended during the 1800s, and the failure to recognize this was one of the contributing factors that lead to World War I. For instance, in unified Germany, an efficient government sprang up to manage the country yet Kaiser Wilhelm II continued to believe that he was an absolute monarch, who could give any order he pleased — but he was utterly incompetent, and when he interfered in the functioning of the government, the result was always a disaster. Yet no one felt ready to say, with certainty, that Germany was no longer a pure monarchy. No one clearly said “The monarch is under constitutional limits, just like the monarch of Britain.” The lack of clarity was itself damaging. And the lack of clarity about Putin’s real position, the base of his support, will also prove damaging. Indeed, it has proven damaging — Putin’s ambiguous, hybrid dictatorship allowed Russia to stumble into the war in Ukraine just as Kaiser Wilhelm II’s bumbling caused Germany to stumble into World War I. Apparently the reversion to personal rule has lead Russia into a war that will prove almost equally a disaster.
Perhaps we should feel sorry for the citizens of Russia, in the 1990s, who had no training in democracy, and who were suddenly expected to know how to fulfill their obligations as citizens, in a country that lacked most of the institutions that we expect to find in a thriving civil society. This was a society with a weakened immune system, and Putin was going to be the virus who found his way in. And yet, the comparison to Ukraine is flattering to Ukrainians while being damning to the Russians. The people of Ukraine rose in rebellion, repeatedly, to establish a real democracy. The Revolution Of Dignity, in 2014, was in some ways the true birth of the modern nation. By contrast, the people of Russia seemed (and seem) unable to fight for themselves.
But even if most Russians seem like sheep being lead to slaughter, there are small signs of rebellion:
We cannot know the future. We cannot know the limits of Putin’s power. But we can study what Putin himself did to maintain power in the past, and from that we can deduce what he himself was afraid of. And from that, we can draw some conclusions.
For whatever reason, we know that Putin felt that it was important that he remain popular with the public. And we know that his popularity peaked with the seizure of Crimea in 2014. We know that Putin himself was worried about his fading popularity, and the aftermath of of the Covid-19 pandemic. We know that Putin was hoping that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine would restore the popularity he enjoyed in 2014. We know that the opposite has happened: that Russia’s defeats in Ukraine have intensified the discontent that Russians were feeling, and so Putin has been forced to establish a traditional dictatorship, a step he’d previously been afraid to take.
So how much power does Putin still have? Clearly, he’s gambled everything on Ukraine. If he can conquer Ukraine, he might still revive the popularity that he enjoyed in 2014. But should the war drag on much longer, the many resentments that have built up over the last 24 years are likely to reach the breaking point. Indeed, at this point, Putin’s main hope is that Trump will be elected as President of the USA in 2024.
To go back to the beginning, and use the language of “Transitions From Authoritarian Rule,” we can ask, who would be the hard-liners, and who would be the soft-liners? The hard-liners are easy to guess: the FSB. This is Putin’s power base. They will remain loyal till the bitter end. But who would be the soft-liners? Most likely the military. They have been the most abused insiders, so they are the ones who mostly likely to be sympathetic to rebellion arising from the public.
The movie “The Death Of Stalin” reminds us how much the military has always hated the KGB/FSB. It’s a rivalry that goes back a century. Zhukov played a central role in killing Beria. And we should expect something similar when Putin’s regime finally comes to an end. And Western leaders need to figure out how they will handle this situation, because, unless Trump is elected President of the USA in 2024, it is realistic to think that this situation could arise in Russia before the end of 2025.