The Putin regime is rigid but brittle, and under increasing stress; don’t switch your phones off
August is known as the “cursed month” in Russia, and with good reason. The August coup of 1991 led to the final downfall of the Soviet Union. I was the Economist’s newly arrived Moscow correspondent when the August financial crisis of 1998 broke. Russia defaulted on its debts and devalued the rouble. Most colleagues were on holiday. I was not.
A year later, in August 1999, the plot in Moscow that put Vladimir Putin in power took shape. An embattled Boris Yeltsin made Putin, then a political nobody, prime minister. A mysterious terrorist attack in Dagestan that month was the first in a string of staged atrocities blamed on Chechen terrorists. Putin’s tough response to these outrages made him a national hero.
In August 2000, the Kursk nuclear submarine sank, highlighting the new Russian leader’s KGB reflexes, notably his callous incompetence. August 2008 brought the Georgian war, proving that Russia could attack other countries with impunity: a fatal lesson. Other Augusts have brought deadly floods and wildfires, plane crashes and other disasters. As my New Yorker colleague Julia Joffe wrote in 2011, “every August, Russians wait for history, and they are rarely disappointed.”
As this August starts, Putin faces the worst combination of diplomatic, economic, financial, political and military problems of his 26 years in power. Fuel shortages caused by targeted Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries are not just an inconvenience, they are creating an inflationary and recessionary shock to the whole Russian economy. They increase political stress too: protecting supplies in Moscow, the city where coups happen, means the regions fume.
This is one reason that the political price of the war is rocketing. Normality — the comforting knowledge that today will be like yesterday, and tomorrow the same — was the great achievement of the Putin years. Now it is in tatters. Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses (roughly: Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, but even more important) have not just disrupted the online shopping habits of tens of millions of Russians, but also incinerated swathes of e-commerce livelihoods. That disrupts the banking system too, which is already groaning under bad loans.
All this comes at a time when Putin’s unwinnable war requires ever more strain and sacrifice. Rumours swirl that the authorities are planning to convert bank deposits to war bonds, and of (at least) partial mobilisation in the coming months. Russia’s Flag Day is on August 22nd, supposedly a national celebration. But the risk of Ukrainian drone strikes mean no public festivities: more humiliation for the Kremlin.
This combination of problems would have been a severe test of Putin’s leadership even at the height of his power and popularity. For an ailing, ageing leader, whose rare and unimpressive public appearances are increasingly a source of mockery, it could be too much. Not only is he politically and physically exhausted. The system he runs has become so rigid that it can no longer cope with stress. That makes it brittle.
Behind the bombast and theatricality, Russian power politics runs on chiefly on fear and greed. How much can you steal? How afraid are you of someone taking it away? What can you do to stop them? The answer to these three questions for a quarter-century has been to stick close to Putin. He lets you steal. Loyalty to him lets you keep it.
Now a new paradigm is taking shape. The boss looks doomed. Nobody wants to go down with him. The question is not if to jump, but when. We do not know when and how Putin’s system will break, but when greed beats fear, the change will be quick.
Edward Lucas is a British journalist, writer and security specialist.
Photo credit: Nikolay Vorobyev on Unsplash