War in Ukraine puts Putin era in Russia at crossroads

March 12, 2022

Robert

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has placed the 21st-century tsar’s reign at a crossroads of radically divergent options, with few in-between paths that appear to guarantee Russia’s return to the relative normalcy it had before the invasion began on February 24.

Putin, as Sam Greene, director of the Russian Institute at King’s College London, puts it, fights not one but several wars. And the result of that military one will be decisive for that of the underlying ones, against the Russian elites, in the public opinion in general and among the few allies that it has left.

More broadly, the very nature of the regime he began assembling on August 9, 1999, when he took office as prime minister, hangs in the balance. Putin is often portrayed in the West as a dictator. There are nuances to this, but they are being lost with the harsh crackdown on non-consensual opposition and the media over the past two years, which has only exacerbated the war.

The ultimate symbol of the process is the arrest of Alexei Navalni, a blogger who organized massive acts against the Kremlin and ended up first poisoned, then arrested. Today, he awaits trial that could see him 15 years in prison, although he continues to be seen as an “outsider” by the average Russian.

Other signs abound, such as the transformation of critical media or NGOs into “foreign agents” by receiving support from abroad, thus being subjected to a draconian tax regime. The next step was to label the same adversaries as extremists, shutting them down.

“Still, the country was not a full-fledged dictatorship,” says Mikhail, a Moscow political scientist who went into exile this week in Riga, Latvia, and asked not to have his last name published. “There was the life of the people, that of the middle class and that of the elites, who maintained a fantasy of guarded freedom while their money and property were safe in the West.”

That said, there was a remnant of a free press, far less than in perhaps the first 15 years of Putin’s rule. The annexation of Crimea and the civil war in Ukraine in 2014 set in motion the change that is now exploding with the invasion. “For the first time I’m afraid to write what I think here,” said English teacher Irina, not her real name, from Khabarovsk, a city in the Russian Far East.

The “here” was the Telegram messaging app. “Everyone started to feel watched”, she says, and then talks about the rumors that circulate about Putin’s mental and physical sanity in the crisis.

She then cites the law that allows punishments like up to 15 years in prison for anyone who speaks ill of the war or even calls it that. Nobody knows the scope of the legislation or whether it will be more than a straw man, but the effect has been reasonable so far.

A reporter for one of the Western media outlets that suspended operations in Russia due to the law said that the day after the rules were enacted, two police officers showed up at his door and accompanied him to work. According to him, they said it was “for your safety”.

But this erosion does not seem to be definitive for Putin’s plans, as the significant absence of people on the street due to fear of arrest proves it. And also the effectiveness of its propaganda: according to three state-run research institutes, about 60% of Russians approve of the invasion. The broth thickens in the war with the elite. Putin rose from a class called “siloviki”, the “toughs”, people from the KGB and the security services. The president was head of the main one, the FSB, before coming to power in the country.

At the start of his term in 2000, Putin was held hostage to the status quo of Boris Yeltsin, the mercurial post-Cold War president, and the country’s social turmoil. Oligarchs, the name given to monopoly businessmen who previously held positions in the communist hierarchy or grew up as entrepreneurs in a mafia state, called the shots.

Putin went after them. TV owner Vladimir Gusinski lost his channels and had to flee, Boris Berezovski was suspiciously hanged in the UK, Mikhail Khodorkovski lost his oil company, spent ten years in jail and now lives in London. None were saints, which made the service easier.

And a new class of oligarchs has emerged, many of them “siloviki” like Putin. Like the tsars, he distributed the command of sectors of the economy, increasingly controlled by the Kremlin, if not presidencies of state-owned companies such as Rosneft (Russian Petrobras), headed by hard-liner Igor Setchin.

It is these people who now face the sanctions applied by the West. Ordinary Russians evidently feel them, but they are hampered. Greene, Mikhail and other analysts tend to agree that for the moment the elites are tied to Putin, and the president seeks to subjugate them.

So far, in these 22 years of power, the president has played a game in which the cession of the economy to them guaranteed him political support, which curiously always needed the patina of popularity.

With the war, that ended. Some oligarchs have spoken out against the conflict, and the Kremlin works to sweeten the account of the tragedy. Still, there are intriguing spasms. On Wednesday’s (9th) edition of “Night with Vladimir Soloviev”, one of the most popular programs on state TV Russia 1, everything looked familiar. The host praised the war and urged the guests, all Kremlin holders, to demonstrate.

Until two common names, filmmaker Karen Chakhnazarov and academic Semion Bagdasarov, decided to question the “special military operation”, as Putin wants the war to be called. The first said that he could not imagine Kiev being conquered militarily; the second swore: “This is worse than Afghanistan.”

The ten-year occupation of the Asian nation (1979-89) ended in national trauma and helped bring the Soviet Union to an end in 1991. Soloviev, a presenter so white-faced he had his “villa” in Italy and other assets frozen by sanctions against the war, intervened and moved the discussion forward.

The program was live, which led to the question of whether this was a real transgression by Putin’s propagandists or if it was something previously agreed, to maintain something that has always existed: the illusion that dissent is allowed with limits to those who surround power. .

Until now, this elite had an interdependence with Putin and drew its strength from the links with the West, now severed. Greene says she is now on the verge of being “salaried and expendable” by the leader, who will tend to grow his authoritarian yoke in the event of an acceptable military victory in Ukraine.

Chakhnazarov himself has questioned this, saying allies like China and India will not tolerate the bloodshed. Not to mention weaker friends, members of the Eurasian Economic Union (Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), who had an average 15% depreciation of their currencies with the war. Among them, Putin bets on the work of conditional support for governments: all have faced upheavals or wars since 2020, a plate full of conspiracy theorists.

As the Ukrainian resistance is tough, but seems insufficient to defeat Putin’s machine, the design after an eventual victory is what will matter: total or partial occupation, slicing of Ukraine or an accommodation that allows everyone to claim victory, but the Kremlin obtains the objective of taking Kiev out of the West.

The option of defeat, on the other hand, should generate nothing less than the implosion of the Putin-era social accord, thus costing you your chair or worse. Names to succeed him are muttered, from technocratic premier Mikhail Michustin to powerful minister Sergei Choigu (Defense), not to mention Setchin. Between some chaos and an eventual dictatorship walk the Russians, a mere 30 years after leaving the shadow of the Soviet Union. There may be alternatives, but they seem unfathomable now.