On regime change – Keith Gessen:

‘It was depoliticization in its purest form. Zhuravlev’s occasional collaborator, the longtime polling expert Elena Koneva, had spent the year and a half since the war began running a project called ExtremeScan, through which she designed polls to figure out the basis for Russian public support of the war and what could cause it to contract. She had seen signs, mostly in the border regions of Russia, that, when the war began to truly affect people’s lives, their opinions started to change. First they experienced fear of retribution—“We have done so many horrible things to Ukraine,” one respondent said, “that the Ukrainian Army will inevitably come here”—but the actual experience of war, of shortages, of shelling, of people being forced to evacuate, began to erode support for the war. And Koneva predicted that, if things got worse, support would erode further. “If people are constantly having to sit in bomb shelters, and women are giving birth without medicine,” she said, “then an end to the war will become their most passionate wish.”’

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‘Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it’s there; the next day, poof—it’s gone. The Moscow-based historian, who asked that his name not be used since he was still in Russia, recalled what it was like to observe the Politburo in the early nineteen-eighties. “They looked like a totally homogeneous mass,” he said. “There was no indication, in their public statements or in anything else, that any of these people thought differently from one another.” But Gorbachev, it turned out, did think differently. In the years to come, he undertook a series of reforms that ended with the Soviet Union ceasing to exist. Authoritarian regimes could seem very stable, until suddenly they weren’t.’

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‘War is a known stressor for personalist dictatorships, which (paradoxically, one might argue) also tend to start more wars. War puts pressure on the economy and on security services, and also has a way of being unpredictable. Between 1919 and 2003, according to the political scientists Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, nearly half of all rulers who lost wars then lost power within a year. (Of these, half were sent into exile and nearly a third were jailed.) This is true of Russian history as well. War losses, such as Russia’s 1905 defeat by Japan, have sometimes led to tectonic shifts in the country’s political life; in 1905, it led to an uprising that forced the tsar to grant his people a constitution. In 1917, the Russian Army’s struggles in the First World War were a major factor in pushing the tsar out of power.’

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‘But, he added, “there is a huge caveat.” Despite its many wars and campaigns, Russia has never actually produced a Caesar—that is, a warlord who marches on the capital with his men and takes political power. There is a reason for that. The traditional political system, arguably still in place to this day, is a triangle comprising the tsar, the boyars, and the people. In times of trouble, the tsar can play the people against the boyars, and vice versa. If things go bad, the boyars can take the blame. This is, in effect, what Prigozhin was asking for—that Putin sack his boyars in the Army, who had made such a hash of the war. Zubok acknowledged the danger inherent in such a strategy for Putin: “You may think that someone is a Red general, but next thing you know they’ve turned around and are executing the Bolshevik leadership”—as happened with Ivan Sorokin, a revolutionary commander in the Russian Civil War who went rogue in the North Caucasus and attacked the Soviet leadership in his own district before finally being killed himself. But this is the sort of thing that happens in the absence of a tsar, when the Smuta is in full swing, whereas Putin, however weakened, remains the tsar. “You have to acknowledge the sources of resilience in this crazy system,” Zubok said. His prediction was that Putin would remain in power, chastened but basically unchanged.’

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‘Nonetheless, he could see no pathway to a Russia without Putin. An analysis in the Times had suggested that there could be talk in his inner circle of asking Putin not to stand for reëlection in 2024. Clement was skeptical. “The trouble with that is, who’s the person who’s going to go in there and say that to him? Who is going to say, ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, look: you are a very rich man—we think you should go and retire and just live happily ever after’?” Clement recalled an incident during the Iran-Iraq War, in which one of Saddam Hussein’s advisers suggested that a way to forge peace would be for Saddam to temporarily step down as Prime Minister. The man was executed and his body parts delivered to his family the next day. “Dictators don’t like to be told that they should retire,” Clement said. He added that, in this, they weren’t necessarily wrong: Could Putin actually retire? Who could guarantee his safety? Wouldn’t whoever replaced him as the ruler of Russia find it very uncomfortable to have Putin still hanging around? “This isn’t like Khrushchev, where he can just go live quietly on his farm,” Clement said. This was a person with a lot of enemies.’

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‘That’s the way these regimes unravel,” Kendall-Taylor said. “At the end of the day, whether it comes from a coup or an insurgency or a protest, Putin will at some point give an order to crack down and fire, and people won’t do it. And that’s the end of the regime.” No one could predict the future. But it was worth trying to analyze the situation and think it through.’

Read the article here.

The Saddam anecdote is telling. Dictators don’t like to be told that they should retire.

And one day or another policemen and soldiers will refuse to fire, yes, but history made very clear that the waiting time can be extremely long.