Putin’s Brittle Regime

By many outward appearances, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power is stronger than ever. The country has rebounded from early military defeats in Ukraine and the initial shock of Western sanctions. State oil is flowing to new markets in Asia, including China, India, and Turkey, and the country’s defense sector is producing more weapons than all of Europe. At home, Putin has crushed what remains of political opposition on both the right and left, having eliminated the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose rebellion against Moscow failed last summer, and popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison in February—and then won an unprecedented fifth term in office in a highly choreographed presidential election in March. Meanwhile, Russian society, buoyed by a 16 percent hike in public spending, has adapted to Moscow’s self-styled “existential confrontation” with the West, which the Kremlin is ready to pursue to the bitter 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 way that lacks even basic quality controls. Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian political elite have grown more pliant in implementing Putin’s orders and more obsequious in pandering to his paranoid worldview. The costs of these structural deficiencies are mounting. But even a horrific terrorist attack by the Islamic State (or ISIS-K) at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow on March 22—killing 145 civilians—failed to make the Russian leadership reconsider its priorities.

Putin’s regime, a highly personalized system run by an aging autocrat, is more brittle than it seems. Driven by Putin’s whims and delusions, Moscow is liable to commit self-defeating blunders. The Russian state effectively implements orders from the top, but it has no control over the quality of those orders. For that reason, it is at permanent risk of crumbling overnight, as its Soviet predecessor did three decades ago.

PITFALLS OF AUTOCRACY

The Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin once noted that the West failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union because the country was simply not collapsing. There were no long-term trends that made the Soviet breakup inevitable. Rather, a relatively stable state was toppled by a series of decisions made at the very top and uncritically implemented by a system void of checks and balances.

Although the comparison may at first seem unlikely, Putin’s situation today resembles in some ways that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev instructed conservative apparatchiks to press ahead with political and economic liberalization. Accustomed to blindly executing orders from above, the officials offered little resistance. Putin has none of Gorbachev’s idealistic humanism, but he does resemble Gorbachev in one critical respect: his ability to impose his personal vision on the Russian state.

Putin has used his concentrated power to throw Russia into a brutal war with Ukraine. Russia’s state bureaucracy devotes more and more resources to anticipating and fulfilling the president’s wishes. Some of the consequences of this increasingly autocratic system are self-evident. Putin has degraded political freedom, impoverished the media landscape, and forced many talented Russians into exile. Other effects are less obvious. The Russian security services spent decades fighting Islamist extremism both at home in the North Caucasus and abroad in Syria. But Putin’s war in Ukraine has made the institutional knowledge of the security forces obsolete, and they now dismiss information shared by Western intelligence agencies. Two weeks before the attack at Crocus City Hall, the United States had identified the concert venue as a possible target of terrorism. Putin described the U.S. warnings as attempts to “intimidate and destabilize our society.”

Putin’s regime, a highly personalized system run by an aging autocrat, is more brittle than it seems.

Investigating and apprehending violent religious extremists is no longer a priority, as the president channels state resources to dreaming up conspiratorial links between terrorist acts and Kyiv. Not even a major terrorist attack near the capital itself has provided a wake-up call. By instructing officials to try to establish Ukrainian involvement in the concert arena massacre, Putin is effectively hamstringing the investigation and distracting from measures to prevent future such attacks.

Similarly, Russian ministries in charge of the economy have ceased to coordinate with one another. Instead, they concentrate on producing figures that will please Putin. The central bank’s efforts to curb inflation with high interest rates go hand in hand with state-subsidized loans ballooning the domestic demand. The government has imposed export embargoes on Russian oil products, rescinded them, and then reimposed them, as part of a turf war between the Energy Ministry, which seeks to lower domestic prices, and the Finance Ministry, which wants higher revenues. The bureaucrats managing the economy have made what were meant to be temporary administrative fixes permanent in order to avoid actual solutions that might displease the president.

Russia’s economic policymakers have garnered international acclaim for keeping the country’s economy afloat amid unprecedented Western sanctions, but they are increasingly stymied by the Kremlin’s despotism, and it is unclear how much longer the current stability can be sustained. These technocrats could also be ditched entirely if Putin decides the war effort requires a tighter grip.

INDECISION FATIGUE

Putin’s indecisiveness tends to be just as destructive as the actual decisions he makes, and here the similarities with the late Soviet Union are especially striking. By the end of 1989, Gorbachev had grown so baffled by the magnitude of the changes he himself had set in motion that he tried to halt the reforms, leaving the state apparatus bereft of a coherent vision and confused as to how to proceed. Deprived of top-level guidance, the Soviet system drifted for a while—before collapsing.

Modern Russia faces a similar problem. Having started an all-consuming war, Putin rarely bothers to explain to state and quasi-state actors how to adapt to the new reality. In the absence of instructions, they either fall into a stupor or take matters into their own hands, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The mercenary leader Prigozhin’s mutiny was a case in point. For years, Prigozhin’s Wagner company, the private militia funded by the Kremlin, coexisted uneasily with the Defense Ministry, but as the war became increasingly bogged down in the east in the late spring of 2023, their mutual hostility reached an apex. When Putin refused to arbitrate between them, Prigozhin launched a rebellion, bringing thousands of heavily armed mercenaries to the outskirts of Moscow. Russia’s bloated security apparatus offered no resistance. 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 laid bare the stunning impotence of the ostensibly mighty Russian state in the absence of the leader’s instructions. It also pushed the country to the verge of a civil war between government forces and a private warlord’s mercenary army.

Two months later, Putin’s failure to rein in extremism set the stage for an attempted pogrom in the mostly Muslim region of Dagestan, in southern Russia, when a mob stormed an airport in search of Jews arriving from Tel Aviv. Such rioting would have been unimaginable before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Russia has stepped up its cooperation with Iran since the war began, and Iranian-influenced anti-Zionism has crept into Moscow’s anti-Western rhetoric. The local authorities did not know whether they should support or suppress these “anti-Israeli activists.” In the end, it required direct intervention from Moscow to disperse the mob.

The terrible human cost of the ISIS-K attack outside Moscow was also a result of ambiguous and contradictory signals from the Kremlin. On the one hand, Russian intelligence agencies are tasked with combating terrorism. On the other, they have a long-institutionalized practice of regarding information that comes from Western powers with suspicion. The March 22 attack would likely not have cost so many lives, and might have been averted entirely, had Russia maintained functional intelligence-sharing channels with the West. Instead, Putin dismissed the U.S. warnings, referring to them as “blackmail,” and Russian intelligence agencies declined to take seriously the sound information with which they were presented.

PUTIN’S HOUSE OF CARDS

Putin’s inflexibility and obduracy have been strengthened by his many years spent surrounded by toadies and yes men. Shielded from negative feedback and objective counsel, he is susceptible to tunnel vision, muddled priorities, and emotional outbursts, all of which are channeled into his decisions. Russia’s foreign policy, domestic security, and economic prospects all 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 surely impinges on his decision-making. A growing sense of his limited time undoubtedly contributed to the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. It may well manifest itself in even greater blunders.

On the surface, Putin’s regime appears stable. The docility of the elite, the persistence of vast financial reserves and oil rents, and the state’s adeptness in shaping public opinion all make Putin seem invincible. But his system is “not collapsing” in the same way that the late Soviet Union was “not collapsing.” 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 envisioned Prigozhin’s mercenaries marching hundreds of miles toward Moscow and meeting hardly 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 setback in Ukraine, elite infighting, or new domestic unrest, could trigger a political avalanche if accelerated by the authorities’ inaction or policies based on Putin’s delusions. It is not the gravity of Russia’s problems but how the Kremlin deals with them that has positioned the regime permanently on the brink of collapse.

A collapse may take years to materialize. Or it could happen in a matter of weeks. But the West should be aware that at any given moment the events in Russia may spiral out of the Kremlin’s control, triggering the swift demise of its seemingly imperishable regime.