NEW YORK (`) – As Russia’s military pulls out of the Kyiv area and faces condemnation for brutal tactics, tough domestic political repression and Western-sanctions-battered economy, opponents and allies alike are asking the same question of President Vladimir Putin: Can he stay in power?
The answer: for now, but maybe not forever.
After 22 years in power, Putin has built a powerful phalanx of loyalists to surround him, both in the Russian military and in the intelligence community. He also has significant support among the Russian people, who are steeped in pro-Putin propaganda through the Russian leader’s near-total control over television and other mass communications media. Even today, many Russians see that his leadership has brought the country greater prestige, prosperity and stability over two decades.
This protective structure, the vast wealth that Putin controls, and the lack of a significant history of palace coups in Russia make one of the obvious means of removing Putin – a military mutiny or a mass popular revolution – almost unthinkable at the moment.
Yet all strongman states are inherently vulnerable to the unforeseen – especially when they turn numb to the society around them. Just ask Hosni Mubarak.
“For God’s sake, this man can’t stay in power,” Putin’s President Joe Biden declared in Poland last month. It was an unwritten but heartfelt comment as the bloodshed in Ukraine mounted.
69-year-old Putin is up for re-election in 2024, and changes in Russia’s constitution would allow him to remain president until 2036. But the imprisonment of Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, is just one sign that Putin is not confident enough in his popularity to face a real democratic test.
While there can be no credible polls in a country now effectively under martial law, the number of informed and courageous Russians who have so far protested the war in Ukraine has numbered in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.
Tens of thousands of wealthy citizens, intellectuals and political critics have left Russia, rather than remain under the tight controls imposed by Putin, and have found refuge in Istanbul, Tbilisi or western cities. This brain drain will undoubtedly hurt Russia in the future. But for now, her departure removes a potential resistance nexus from society.
Of course, history is unpredictable. Few anticipated the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If Russian losses in Ukraine are as high as reported – 15,000 or more dead and three times that many wounded in six weeks – these results will eventually seep through society, despite official censorship.
The fate of the USSR was arguably sealed in 1986 after its then-leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, loosened the Communist Party’s iron grip on information and envisaged restructuring the Soviet Union’s faltering economy to better compete with the West. That was the year of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when the Politburo—after initially trying to cover up the disaster—was forced to disclose it to the Soviet public. The Soviet war in Afghanistan had meanwhile turned into a quagmire, which led to the withdrawal in 1988/89.
When Polish workers loyal to the independent trade union movement Solidarity launched a series of strikes in coal mines and shipyards in 1988, Gorbachev signaled that he would not intervene in one of the Soviet Union’s key satellite states. Then-Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski, whose imposition of martial law in 1981 had gotten the country nowhere, chose instead to start talks with strike leader Lech Walesa. The result: partially democratic elections.
This in turn set in motion a series of dominoes in the Eastern European countries, with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania all trying to escape Soviet dominance and Communist rule. The fever soon spread to the Baltic countries, which were part of the Soviet Union itself, and nationalist feelings flared up across the Union.
Hardliners in Moscow, having seen enough, attempted a coup against Gorbachev, but they came too late. That was quickly undone by the broad wave of support from Boris Yeltsin. On December 31, 1991, both Gorbachev and the Soviet Union had been swept aside when the Soviet Union ended.
Putin, then a secret service agent in the GDR, witnessed the events and drew the appropriate conclusions in order to remain in control. Even before the war in Ukraine, he worked to shape public opinion by portraying Ukrainians as Nazis threatening Russia. He then cracked down on independent media organizations and the few remaining civil society groups.
More recently, he has imposed draconian anti-media laws that forbid telling the Russian public anything about the war that conflicts with the Kremlin’s chosen “special military operation” narrative. Dissenters and doubters were branded as scum and gnats only worth spitting out.
Aside from Gorbachev, the only Soviet leader to be deposed was Nikita Khrushchev, whose 11-year tenure ended in 1964.
He was driven out by his closest associates in the Communist Party. Troubled by a series of disastrous economic decisions, a failed initiative to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, and signs that Khrushchev intended to develop a personality cult, colleagues at the communist presidium denounced him in a closed session during his absence.
When he returned to find that he had lost all support, Khrushchev agreed to resign on fictional grounds of ill health. He soon became a non-person within the Soviet Union as his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, took over. But again, Khrushchev’s bloodless removal was unique.
Could something like this happen to Putin if economic conditions worsen or if the Ukrainian invasion is a disaster for Russia?
Unlike the Soviet Union, there is little institutional party structure that could intervene to overthrow him. Putin has cronies, even men, and a clique of “siloviki” — power-mongers awash in hard-nosed nationalist thinking about the FSB and the military — none of whom have dared to claim even the slightest independence from Putin’s Ukraine war “project.” to show.
Yet battlefield casualties have already led to an apparent reduction in military targets, which has angered and disappointed some anti-Ukraine pundits on Russian television.
While Putin’s clique has every reason to stay close for now or risk the loss of privilege and wealth, it almost certainly is when the war in Ukraine drags on for months or years and Putin’s adventure becomes the mammoth disaster it is so far seems certain that cracks will develop.
Without Russia’s total victory over Ukraine, it’s already hard to imagine the world returning to normal with Vladimir Putin. He could find himself locked in a grueling open conflict on his border and faced with the need to impose ever-increasing repression at home to quell dissent in a populace struggling to bear the economic consequences of the invasion.
Aging leaders rarely last forever or have the luxury of leaving office on their own terms. Whether through elections, revolts, or an internal mutiny, the long days of Putin’s rule may be numbered.
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John Daniszewski, former senior editor for international news at The Associated Press, first reported from Eastern Europe in 1987 and has worked from Warsaw, Johannesburg, Cairo, Moscow, Baghdad and London. He is currently `’s vice president for standards and the general editor. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jdaniszewski
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