“Putin’s regime is more fragile than it seems, and the state is at risk of falling apart overnight”: Maxim Samorukov in an analysis for Foreign Affairs – World

The country’s oil is flowing to new markets in Asia, including China, India and Turkey, and the country’s defense sector produces more weapons than all of Europe. At home, Putin crushed what remained of political opposition on both the right and the left, eliminating mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose rebellion against Moscow collapsed last summer, and popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison in February. , indicates Maksim Samorukov, an associate of the Carnegie Center in Berlin in an analysis for Foreign Affairs.

Then, Samorukov recalls, Putin won his fifth term in the presidential elections in March. Meanwhile, Russian society, buoyed by a 16 percent increase in public spending, has adjusted to Moscow’s self-proclaimed “existential confrontation” with the West, which the Kremlin is prepared to see through to the end.

But Putin’s Russia is vulnerable, and its vulnerabilities are hidden in plain sight. Now more than ever, the Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary manner that lacks even basic quality controls.

Since Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian political elite has become more lenient in carrying out Putin’s orders and more submissive in pandering to his paranoid worldview.

The costs of these structural deficiencies are increasing. But even the horrific terrorist attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow on March 22 that killed 145 civilians failed to force the Russian leadership to reconsider its priorities.

Putin’s regime, a highly personalized system led by an aging autocrat, is more fragile than it appears. Guided by Putin’s whims and delusions, Moscow is prone to self-defeating mistakes.

The Russian state effectively carries out orders from the top, but has no control over the quality of those orders. For this reason, it is at permanent risk of collapsing overnight, as its Soviet predecessor did three decades ago.

The pitfalls of autocracy

Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin once noted that the West did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union because the country simply wasn’t falling apart. There were no long-term trends that made the collapse of the Soviet Union inevitable.

More precisely, a relatively stable state was overthrown by a series of decisions made at the very top and uncritically implemented in a system without checks and balances.

Although the comparison may seem unlikely at first, Putin’s situation today is somewhat reminiscent of that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union.

In the late 1980s, Gorbachev ordered conservative apparatchiks to continue political and economic liberalization. Accustomed to blindly following orders from above, officials offered little resistance.

Putin has none of Gorbachev’s idealistic humanism, but he resembles Gorbachev in one critical respect: his ability to impose his personal vision on the Russian state.

Putin used his concentrated power to plunge Russia into a brutal war with Ukraine. Russia’s state bureaucracy is devoting more and more resources to anticipating and fulfilling the president’s wishes.

Some of the consequences of this increasingly autocratic system are obvious. Putin has degraded political freedom, impoverished the media landscape and forced many talented Russians into exile.

Other effects are less obvious. Russian security services have spent decades fighting Islamist extremism, both at home in the North Caucasus and abroad in Syria. But Putin’s war in Ukraine has rendered the security forces’ institutional knowledge obsolete, and they now reject information shared by Western intelligence agencies.

Two weeks before the Crocus City Hall attack, the United States identified the concert venue as a possible terrorist target. Putin described the US warnings as attempts to “intimidate and destabilize our society”.

Investigating and arresting violent religious extremists is no longer a priority, as the president directs state resources to forge conspiratorial links between terrorist acts and Kyiv.

Even a major terrorist attack near the capital did not give a wake-up call. By instructing officials to try to determine Ukraine’s involvement in the concert arena massacre, Putin is effectively hampering the investigation and distracting attention from measures to prevent future such attacks.

Similarly, Russian ministries in charge of the economy have stopped coordinating with each other. Instead, they are concentrating on producing figures to please Putin.

The Central Bank’s efforts to curb inflation with high interest rates go hand-in-hand with government-subsidized loans that boost domestic demand.

The government imposed an export embargo on Russian petroleum products, lifted it, then reimposed it, amid a clash between the Energy Ministry, which wants to lower domestic prices, and the Finance Ministry, which wants more revenue.

Bureaucrats running the economy made permanent what should have been temporary administrative fixes to avoid real solutions that might displease the president.

Russia’s economic policymakers have won international acclaim for keeping the country’s economy afloat amid unprecedented Western sanctions, but they are increasingly hamstrung by the Kremlin’s despotism and it is unclear how much longer the current stability can be maintained.

These technocrats could also be jettisoned altogether if Putin decides the war effort requires a firmer grip.

Putin’s indecision

Putin’s indecision tends to be as destructive as the actual decisions he makes, and here the similarities to the late Soviet Union are particularly striking.

By the end of 1989, Gorbachev was so bewildered by the magnitude of the changes he had initiated that he tried to stall the reforms, leaving the state apparatus bereft of a coherent vision and confused about how to proceed. Deprived of top-level guidance, the Soviet system floundered for a while – before collapsing.

Modern Russia faces a similar problem. Having started an all-out war, Putin rarely bothers to explain to state and quasi-state actors how to adapt to the new reality.

In the absence of instruction, they either fall into a stupor or take matters into their own hands, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The rebellion of the mercenary leader Prigozhin was a real example.

For years, Prigozhin’s Wagner Company, a Kremlin-funded private militia, had coexisted uneasily with the Ministry of Defense, but as the war in the east grew more entrenched in the late spring of 2023, their mutual hostility reached a fever pitch.

When Putin refused to arbitrate between them, Prigozhin launched a mutiny, bringing thousands of heavily armed mercenaries to the outskirts of Moscow. Russia’s bloated security apparatus did not resist. Putin intervened at the 11th hour, orchestrating a negotiated end to the crisis and then (almost certainly) ordering the downing of Prigozhin’s private plane, resulting in his death. The crisis exposed the stunning impotence of the seemingly powerful Russian state in the absence of a leader’s instructions.

It also pushed the country to the brink of civil war between government forces and a private warlord’s mercenary army.

Two months later, Putin’s failure to curb extremism set the scene for an attempted pogrom in the predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan, in southern Russia, when a mob stormed the airport in search of Jews arriving from Tel Aviv.

Such riots would have been unthinkable before a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Russia has stepped up cooperation with Iran since the start of the war, and Iranian-influenced anti-Zionism has seeped into Moscow’s anti-Western rhetoric.

The local authorities did not know whether they should support or suppress these “anti-Israel activists”. In the end, direct intervention from Moscow was needed to disperse the mob.

The terrible human cost of ISIS-K attacks outside Moscow is also the result of ambiguous and contradictory signals from the Kremlin. On the one hand, Russian intelligence agencies are tasked with fighting terrorism.

On the other hand, they have a long-institutionalized practice of viewing information coming from Western powers with suspicion. The March 22 attack probably would not have cost so many lives, and might have been avoided entirely, if Russia had maintained functional intelligence channels with the West.

Instead, Putin dismissed the American warnings, calling them “blackmail,” and Russian intelligence agencies refused to take seriously the reliable information they were presented with.

House of cards

Putin’s inflexibility and stubbornness have been reinforced by his long years surrounded by toads and, yes, men. Shielded from negative feedback and objective advice, he is susceptible to tunnel vision, confused priorities, and emotional outbursts, all of which are channeled into his decisions.

Russia’s foreign policy, internal security and economic prospects suffer as a result.

Many dictators are obsessed with history and their personal legacy, and Putin is no exception. He has been in power longer than any Russian leader since Stalin. At 71, he is also approaching the point at which most of his twentieth-century predecessors died.

His awareness of his own mortality certainly affects his decision-making. A growing sense of his limited time undoubtedly contributed to the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. It may manifest itself in even bigger mistakes.

On the surface, Putin’s regime appears stable. The obedience of the elite, the persistence of huge financial reserves and oil rents, and the skill of the state in shaping public opinion make Putin invincible.

But his system is “not collapsing” in the same way that the late Soviet Union “didn’t collapse”. And as with the Soviet Union, the structure of Putin’s regime makes it far more fragile than it appears.

Consider that, just a year ago, hardly anyone could have imagined Prigozhin’s mercenaries marching hundreds of miles toward Moscow and encountering barely any resistance along the way, or an anti-Semitic mob storming a Russian international airport. Similar unpredictability is likely to mark future crises of the Russian regime.

Even a minor incident, whether a backsliding in Ukraine, elite infighting, or new domestic unrest, could trigger a political avalanche if precipitated by government inaction or policies based on Putin’s delusions.

It is not the severity of Russia’s problems but the way the Kremlin deals with them that has permanently placed the regime on the brink of collapse.

A collapse can take years to materialize. Or it could happen in a few weeks. But the West should be aware that at any moment events in Russia can slip out of the Kremlin’s control, causing the rapid demise of its seemingly ephemeral regime.