By many 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.
But, despite all that, Putin’s regime is fragile and in danger of collapsing, analysts say. Driven by Putin’s whims and delusions, Moscow is prone to blunders, and its commands have lost something essential: control over them, indicating that it is on the verge of collapse.
Like the Soviet one that preceded it, Putin’s system is always on the verge of collapse. Putin’s Russia is vulnerable and its frailties are hidden in plain sight. Now, more than ever, the Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary way, without basic quality control, according to Foreign Affairs.
Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian political elite has become more flexible in carrying out Putin’s orders and more obsessed with satisfying his paranoid worldview.
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The costs of these structural deficiencies are increasing. But even a horrific terrorist attack by the Islamic State (ISIS-K) on 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 led by an aging autocrat, is more fragile than it appears. Driven by Putin’s whims and delusions, Moscow is prone to self-defeating blunders. The Russian state effectively implements orders from above, but has no control over the quality of those orders. Because of this, it is in constant danger of collapsing overnight, as its Soviet predecessor did three decades ago.
Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin once noted that the West failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union because the country simply did not collapse. There were no long-term trends that made Soviet breakup inevitable. Rather, a relatively stable state was overthrown by a series of decisions made at the top and uncritically implemented by a system lacking checks and balances.
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Although the comparison may seem improbable at first, Putin’s situation today is in some ways similar to that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s Russia may collapse at any moment
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 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 carrying out 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.
Putin’s indecision tends to be as destructive as the actual decisions he makes, and here the similarities to the end of the Soviet Union are particularly striking.
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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 20th-century predecessors died.
On the surface, Putin’s regime appears stable. But his system is not “collapsing” in the same way that the Soviet Union “collapsed”. And as with the Soviet Union, the structure of Putin’s regime makes it much more fragile than it appears.
A collapse can take years to materialize. Or it can 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, triggering the rapid demise of its seemingly imperishable regime.
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