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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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From the moment a shaky, expletive-filled video emerged of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private plane plummeting from the skies near Tver, speculation has run rampant. Whether sabotaged, bombed, or shot down, such a public and spectacular elimination of such a high-profile political challenger precisely two months following his insurrection, we’re told (with good reason), could only have been the handiwork of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yet what the entire Prigozhin drama—from mutiny, to accommodation, to fiery demise—means for the Putin regime has been wholly speculative, because our well-worn metrics of regime strength tell us little about a personalist autocracy where political power has become divorced from popular sovereignty. Without a better framework for understanding Kremlin politics, predictions about the future of Putin’s Russia increasingly rely on conjecture, hand-waving, and wishful thinking, with little thought to the mechanisms of political change.

Two months ago, the speed and ease with which Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries moved from their positions in Ukraine, took Rostov-on-Don, and sped toward Moscow—and then relented just as suddenly—surprised political watchers in Russia and around the world.

At the time, many made breathless predictions about the Putin regime that failed to materialize. Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries did not march on the Kremlin and topple Putin’s regime. The demoralized Russian military in Ukraine did not fall back in disarray: The front did not collapse, and the war did not end. Indeed, the Russian defenses seem to have stymied the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Domestically, Russian political, military, and economic elites have not fractured, leading to the anticipated mass chaos (“bardak” in Russian) or civil war. The Russian Federation did not fragment and dissolve into its various ethno-national regions. The Russian state did not collapse. Neither did Putin.

In fact, Moscow, its people, and elites seem to have dusted themselves off from the Prigozhin mutiny and returned to “normalcy,” or whatever passes for it in Russia these days. “Spin dictator” Putin has employed diplomacy and the Kremlin public relations machine to reassure allies and Russians that all is calm and well. Even the anticipated mass military purges and upheavals have failed to materialize. Beyond the very public disposal of Prigozhin, other Kremlin personnel decisions appear to be both marginal and handled far from the public eye.

Yet the most curious legacy of the Prigozhin mutiny was the near-universal consensus that it had “weakened” Putin’s regime. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Putin’s response to the armed Wagner rebellion “weak.” Former U.S. ambassadors to Moscow for the Obama (Michael McFaul) and Trump (John Sullivan) administrations gave identical assessments. Russia-watching foreign-affairs mavens David Remnick, Ian Bremmer, Evelyn Farkas, Tom Nichols, Tom Friedman, Mikhail Zygar, Mark Galeotti, Alexandra Prokopenko, EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell, Boris Grozovski, Timothy Snyder, and virtually every pundit imaginable concluded that Putin was weaker after Prigozhin’s mutiny than before it.

The obviousness of this consensus is matched only by its vacuousness. Not only does no one know what this purported weakness means, analysts don’t even know what it looks like or how it is measured, rendering it all but useless as an explanation for Kremlin politics. It feels right that the rebellion of a onetime ally would hurt Putin—but actually showing how is the challenge.

The brief post-coup career of Prigozhin has only underscored regime strength as nothing more than a journalistic cliché. If Prigozhin’s challenge weakened Putin, then Putin defusing the crisis and co-opting the Wagner units surely strengthened his regime? Nope. According to Brian Klaas in the Atlantic, “Every moment that Prigozhin lived made Putin look weaker,” emboldening his enemies. Max Boot in the Washington Post concurred that Prigozhin’s return to Russia reinforced “the impression of Putin’s weakness.”

So if Prigozhin’s political challenge makes Putin weak, and accommodation also makes Putin weak, then surely we should agree that the spectacular elimination of Prigozhin makes Putin strong, right? Some, like Boot, claim it shows Putin is “as strong as ever”; still others run with headlines boldly proclaiming that “Prigozhin is dead, but Putin is still weakened.”

This is madness. If everything equates to weakness, then regime strength and weakness cease to be useful political concepts.

There are some areas where we can put hard numbers to Putin’s power. We could examine Russia’s military strength or weakness with reference to the number of troops, weapons, and diminishing capabilities and discipline over time. We could examine Russia’s economic weakness by pointing to diminishing GDP, living standards, employment, or the dips in the ruble’s exchange rate—usually portending economic calamities that never seem to materialize. But military power and economic performance are different from regime strength and stability. Politically, what do we look at to gauge whether Putin is strong or weak, much less to determine whether he’s getting stronger or weaker over time?

In liberal democracies—in which sovereignty lies with the people—we equate leadership strength with popularity. And there is a logic to it: A leader will look to remain in power by bolstering their popularity to get reelected. A weak leader will have difficulty rallying support for their legislative agenda and will likely get voted out of office. The leader is gone, but the system endures.

Putin’s Russia, of course, is no liberal democracy but a personalist dictatorship in which the leader is the system. So how do we measure leadership strength or weakness?

Most have begun by simply applying the popular-support metric of liberal democracies: Logically, Putin is strong because of his persistently high public approval ratings, juxtaposed against his widely loathed predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Consequently, one hallmark of Putin’s two-decade rule in Russia has been a state-run media environment cultivating an image of leadership, swagger, and economic and political stability to bolster Putin’s approval numbers.

Divining just how much public support for the increasingly authoritarian Putin regime is genuine is a tricky business. Pollsters used to simply ask respondents whether Russia needs a “strong leader” or a leader “with a strong hand,” but these subjective results were meaningless, as a democratic Winston Churchill could be perceived as a strong leader just as much as, say, an autocratic Saddam Hussein.

Increasing domestic repression—especially with the escalation of the war in Ukraine—has prompted researchers to devise ever-more creative survey metrics to sidestep conformity pressures and gauge regime support. Still, the fundamental question remains unresolved: How do public image and popularity—genuine or not—matter to the strength or weakness of the regime itself?

In summarizing the state of the art in Kremlin studies, Columbia political scientist Timothy Frye’s 2021 book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, suggests how the practical trade-offs between political repression and fawning propaganda constrain Putin’s political strength and latitude for policymaking. But if Putin was already a “weak strongman” before the war, what does it mean now that he’s apparently even weaker following the Prigozhin mutiny? And somehow weaker still following his assassination.

The answer is that we don’t know, because regime power in Russia has become uncoupled from popular sovereignty and the will of the people.

From the outside, we don’t objectively know how—or even if—relative differences in political strength (however measured) lead to different political outcomes in Putin’s Russia. If we had a better grasp of this relationship, then perhaps our analyses of Kremlin decision-making wouldn’t so often be reduced to constantly invoked Putin-as-a-cornered-rat tropes.

One reason Westerners don’t know how to properly conceptualize regime strength and weakness as a variable in Russian politics is because they repeatedly and mistakenly impose Western liberal conceptions that sovereignty ultimately lies with the people onto a Russian environment where that is no longer the case, if ever it was.

Putin’s decadeslong ratcheting-up of “new authoritarian” repression and propaganda has succeeded in removing the Russian people as a collective political force in Russian politics. An atomized, apathetic people cannot coordinate together en masse to overwhelm the powers of Putin’s authoritarian state. This is not to exonerate the Russian people from the crimes committed in their name but more to lament a pitiable state of affairs.

At the height of the Prigozhin mutiny, many jumping to call it a “civil war”—fearing a “brother killing brother” scenario as the Russian people sided with either Prigozhin or Putin—miscast an elite struggle within the Kremlin as a societal challenge to the political regime itself. Ultimately, such public-uprising scenarios failed to materialize, not only because of public apathy (it’s hard to have a civil war where no one cares), but because regime strength is disconnected from the people in the first place.

When Putin imposed forced conscription for an increasingly unpopular war, many expected massive resistance and backlash against the regime. Instead, the only mass movement was of draft-age men toward the borders. Fleeing the country is an individual decision; mass opposition requires deep societal trust in other would-be resisters not to kowtow to the regime’s truncheons. Whatever social solidarity that, for instance, mobilized Russians to rally against the hard-line Soviet coup of August 1991 has been successfully drained, as an entire generation has grown up knowing only the increasingly repressive Putinist autocracy.

And when Putin launched his ill-advised war on Ukraine in February 2022, many placed their hopes in fantasies that the Russian people would rise up. Dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky called for a “revolution” to topple Putin. Pundits publicly wished for putschist elites to do the will of the “long-suffering, much-bamboozled Russian people.” It didn’t happen. After the few sporadic protests were put down by force, there has been not even a hint of an uprising. If Prigozhin’s all-out military insurrection and march on Moscow couldn’t stir the Russian people from their oppression and apathy, it is hard to imagine what could.

This is not merely the usual parsing of opinion survey methodologies to divine whether citizens of an increasingly repressive Russian state are genuine in their support of the Russian president. Instead, this gets at the more uncomfortable core question: Does it matter if the Russian people support Putin or not? Even in the most fundamental political questions—dealing with war and peace—the people seem to be an afterthought.

With political power and regime strength completely divorced from popular sovereignty, the entire notion of a political leader being strong or weak loses all meaning, as it has become unmoored from the bedrock of political authority. Putin’s potential future political decisions may reflect any number of variables—brokering deals between rival Kremlin clans; satiating interpersonal rivalries; weighing military, economic, or geostrategic trade-offs—but attributing any particular decision to Putin’s relative political strength or weakness is an exercise in futility without grounding in popular sovereignty.

An alternative way to conceive of political strength or weakness would be in terms of the potential range of institutional levers, personnel choices, and political options available to the leader. A strong leader—unencumbered by checks on executive power—would have a wide range of options, whereas a weak leader would be more constrained. If we understand Putin to have been weakened by Prigozhin, what exactly is it that Putin cannot do now that he could have done before the mutiny? How has he been constrained? And by whom? If anything, the very public demise of Prigozhin should underscore the unconstrained breadth of Putin’s political options.

Understanding Russia better may mean coming up with better frameworks for explaining Putin-era policymaking—or living with the uncomfortable humility that we simply may not be able to anticipate future political trajectories using such outmoded tools.

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