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Politics


THE TERRIBLE TRUTH SO MANY EXPERTS MISSED ABOUT RUSSIA


VLADIMIR PUTIN DIDN’T ALWAYS RULE HIS COUNTRY ALONE. NOW HE DOES, AND THE
DICTATOR APPEARS TO CARE LITTLE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS ACTIONS.

By Ben Judah
Feb 28, 202211:28 AM

Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. Russian Pool/Reuters TV via Reuters
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The belief that Vladimir Putin was bluffing, that he would never give the order
for the nearly 200,000-man army he had spent months amassing on the borders of
Ukraine to invade, persisted as late as 5:45 a.m. Moscow time the day of the
attack, when, grimacing in a red tie, Russia’s ruler of almost 23 years
announced in a prerecorded statement what he called “a special military
operation.”

This was not just a shock on American political Twitter. It was a shock to many
of the leading experts and policymakers in the United States, Europe, and even
Ukraine. The head of German intelligence was so caught off guard that he was
still in Kyiv and had to be evacuated.

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But nowhere did the shock feel more profound than among foreign policy analysts
in Russia, where overwhelming consensus, until that very moment, had been that
Putin would never launch such a war.

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Even someone as experienced as Sir John Sawers, former head of the British
intelligence agency MI6—the role code-named M in the James Bond universe—told me
just a week before the invasion began: “The idea that Putin was actually going
to invade the whole of Ukraine, topple the Kyiv government, and occupy the whole
country, for years to come—I never thought that that was a realistic prospect.”*

Among even the leaders who had spent weeks warning a major offensive was
imminent, a tone of surprise was not too hard to detect in their statements. “I
cannot believe this is being done in your name,” said British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson, trying to address, for a moment, the Russian people, “or that you
really want the pariah status it will bring to the Putin regime.”

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However, that phrase—“the Putin regime”—which has been stuck to all discussions
of Russian politics now for almost 20 years, in some ways itself helps explain
why so many people who believed they understood the country turned out to be so
wrong about the Ukraine conflict. It has become clear that what exists inside
the Kremlin is no longer a “regime” at all—a system of government where multiple
figures can affect and feed into decision-making, from security chiefs to
billionaires—as many believed.

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Instead, it has transformed into what political scientists call a personalist
dictatorship, where the whims of one man, and one man only, determine policy, a
fact that has terrifying implications for Russia and the world.

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Americans tend to see the world in much the same way as President Joe Biden
frames it in his speeches, divided neatly between “democracies” and
“autocracies.” But the reality is that authoritarian states exist on a political
spectrum depending on how much power is exercised by a single individual—and
where states land on this spectrum has a big impact on matters of war and peace.
At one end, you have civilian-run regimes, like Hu Jintao’s China or Leonid
Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where political power is checked and shared within a
ruling party. At the other, you have personalist dictatorships like that of,
say, Saddam Hussein, where rivals are purged, loyalists are rewarded, cults of
personality flourish, and all authority runs through the glorious leader.

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The political science literature suggests that personalist dictatorships are
more erratic and dangerous to the outside world than other sorts of autocracies.

Researchers have found they are more likely to start wars, for instance
(institutionalized civilian-run regimes are about as apt to use force as
democracies), and also tend to perform worse militarily (not surprising, since
their leaders are often surrounded by yes men). But while civilian-run regimes
might be less apt to launch destructive, harebrained conflicts in the short
term, in the long term they can still be ticking time bombs.

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That’s because as they age, their intricate power structures often devolve and
allow dictators to consolidate personal control. In a forthcoming paper, Andrew
Leber and Matthew Reichert of Harvard University and Christopher Carothers of
the University of Pennsylvania theorize that this tends to happen when there’s
no influential old guard of political elites who can stop them. All of which
pretty much sums up what has happened in Russia over the last two decades.

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While the world’s news readers may long have thought of Vladimir Putin as a
dictator, most Russia analysts and policymakers saw the Kremlin differently. And
for most of Putin’s nearly 23-year journey in power, they were right to do so.
What existed was a complicated regime beyond one man where lots of people
exerted influence and could check Putin’s impulses.

Putin began his rule as Boris Yeltsin’s chosen successor in 1999. Then, he was a
kind of semi-democratic populist strongman—closer to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip
Erdogan than the Putin of today. He turned toward full-on authoritarianism with
the rigged 2004 Russian elections. But his government still looked to the U.S.
Embassy like a regime in which billionaires and security chiefs influenced grand
strategy when he installed Dmitry Medvedev as puppet president from 2008 to 2012
and toyed with retirement.

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Mass protests against the government may have changed Putin’s thinking, and he
began to tighten his grip on power after returning to the presidency in 2012. As
Leber and his co-authors note, by then, nobody in Russia was in a position to
challenge him. But, even as late as 2014, when Putin decided to annex Crimea,
the move was taken after a night of intense discussion with his inner circle in
the Kremlin—after commissioning secret polls on public opinion. There was still
some semblance of a regime, albeit one in which Putin tightly controlled its
reins.

This brings us to today. A key reason that many wise foreign policy hands
thought Russia was bluffing about an invasion was that they assumed Putin wasn’t
making his decisions alone. This assumption informed much of Western strategy.
Experts believed that threatening Russian oligarchs with sanctions, for
instance, would encourage Putin’s inner circle to push back against war.
Offering accommodation—for example, changes to the Ukrainian Constitution,
autonomy for the Donbas region under the Minsk Agreement, or a 20-year
moratorium on NATO expansion—would satisfy the regime’s rational actors, the
thinking went, even if Putin himself had grander visions of territorial
conquest. Threats of economic sanctions were supposed to raise the oligarchs’
concerns about public backlash. The prospect of high casualties, of what was
already certain to be a very unpopular war, convinced many that a regime
concerned somewhat with public opinion would undertake it.

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The world is now realizing that the Putin regime is really just Vladimir Putin.

But the world is now realizing that the Putin regime is really just Vladimir
Putin. And he is apparently no longer worried about what war will mean for
Russia’s rich, much less its masses.

This was made brutally clear to all in the astonishing session of the Russian
security council a week ago. In the echoing and ornate hall of St. Catherine in
the Kremlin, a former imperial throne room where the annexation of Crimea was
announced in 2014, Putin gathered his most senior lieutenants to “consult them”
on whether to recognize the independence of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk
People’s Republics.

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Not only did many of them look visibly uncomfortable, but the head of Russian
foreign intelligence, Sergey Naryshkin, looked actually scared—to the point
where he forgot whether he was being asked whether or not to welcome the
republics into Russia itself or merely if they should be recognized as
independent.

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The same shift was more subtly visible in St. Catherine’s Hall after the
fighting began.

Putin summoned the country’s leading businessmen to what the Western press
described as an “oligarchs meeting.” However, as astutely noted by the Financial
Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Max Seddon, few of those present were what we
actually think of as oligarchs: billionaires of independent wealth, power, and
influence, the type who dominated Russia back in the 1990s.

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Instead, those at the “oligarchs meeting” were by and large state company
directors with an intelligence background or Putin cronies elevated to great
wealth—men who owe their positions to Putin, not the other way around; men who
act as placeholders and frontmen for him in the commanding heights of the
economy. The best way to understand their political position is through a joke
common in Moscow: “They are not oligarchs; they just work as oligarchs.”

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At this point, analysis of what Russia might do next largely consists of
guessing the state of Putin’s mind. (As the New York Times’ Tom Friedman put it,
“The only place to be for understanding this war is inside Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s head.”)

The press is chock-full of speculation about his sanity; now that he’s ordered
Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert, we’ve all been forced to contemplate the
possibility that this conflict could somehow spiral into atomic death and
destruction. Certainly, it’s unclear who could stop Putin from irrational
action.

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But how did so many miss that Putin and his rule had changed? Part of the answer
is that Putin has been in power so long that much analysis simply got frozen in
the past. Impressions about a Russia dominated by “oligarchs” froze into legend
and did not keep up with their effective liquidation as a class. (It didn’t help
that Westerns know plenty of Russian billionaires from the Davos circuit, but
don’t know the security officials who’ve increasingly embraced the sort of
religious nationalism that seems to have gripped Putin.)

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The pandemic also made it difficult for outsiders to notice Putin’s apparent
descent into paranoid isolation; he has apparently cloistered himself for the
past few years through ultra-strict personal lockdowns and social distancing
measures that may have affected his judgment. The absurdly long tables Putin has
sat at for meetings have become a symbol of his remoteness (and a pretty good
meme). French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly found him a completely
“different person” in early February from the man he last met in 2019.

And finally, Western Russia analysis failed because it depends on Russian
analysis of its own society, and that failed even more catastrophically. There,
an expert class inured by decades of propaganda underestimated the effect that
the systematic dismantling of Russian journalism has had on its ability to know
what goes on inside the Kremlin. This, mixed with denial: It was simply too
terrifying to contemplate the fact Russians were living under dictatorship where
all the guardrails had fallen off. Though Americans may think of Russia as a
society used to tyrants, this is subtly missing the point. The post-Stalin
Soviet Union was a collectively ruled, civilian-led authoritarian regime, not
one-man rule. Stalin died when Putin was less than 5 months old, meaning the
ability to spot the warning signs of personalist dictatorship are almost as
distant to Russians as Hitler is to the Germans.

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What can we expect next in this new phase of Putinism? Unfortunately, the
political science literature makes grim reading for Russians. As studies would
predict, the invasion of Ukraine is going quite poorly. But only 12.5 percent of
personalist leaders lost power within two years after losing a war, according to
a 2009 data set. Research by Desha Girod, Megan Stewart, and Meir Walters at
Georgetown suggests that oil-rich autocrats are better positioned to repress
dissent at home while resisting international pressure. Research also
comprehensively shows that leaders like Putin tend to be removed only by death
or a coup. The more intense the personalization of a government, the harder it
is to execute a coup—but it is harder still to imagine a peaceful transition of
power in Russia.



There is a ray of hope, however. Of the world’s wealthier authoritarian states,
Russia is arguably the only one to briefly have had something of a democracy and
a free society in its modern history (the debate depends on whether you still
count Turkey as a democracy). All the others—the Gulf petro-monarchies, China,
Singapore, Kazakhstan—have never experienced a break in authoritarian rule. That
may make some of Russia’s elites and regular citizens more likely to push back
rather than accept a deeper descent into autocracy. Putin’s war is already
imposing a new repressive order on society while sanctions are isolating it from
the world economy. In both cases, this means taking Russians backward, toward
something more like the USSR than the last few years—a considerably more
difficult task than other personalist dictators have attempted. Much as the
invasion of Ukraine is proving harder than Putin seems to have expected, so too
might pulling off that degree of oppression.

Correction, Feb. 28, 2022: This piece originally misidentified the code name of
the head of MI6 in James Bond as C. It is M.


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Russia Vladimir Putin Ukraine
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