Autocracy won’t make Russia great

Since his election as president in 2000, Vladimir Putin has methodically consolidated power in his hands with the expressed aim of making Russia great again. Instead, he’s diminished his country’s power and global standing in every respect but one — Moscow’s ability to threaten its neighbors with nuclear weapons.

Russian observers have characterized Putin’s increasingly autocratic reign as a tacit pact with Russian society: The Kremlin won’t interfere in the everyday lives of citizens if they stay out of politics. It’s a bad bargain for the Russian people.   

For one thing, it’s cost them a rare shot at governing themselves after centuries of czarist and totalitarian despotism. Over the past two decades, Putin has steadily snuffed out post-Soviet Russia’s incipient democracy — rigging elections, jailing dissidents and journalists, suppressing independent civic associations and colluding in the assassination of regime critics at home and around the world.

A genuinely free market economy governed by impartial laws also has been sacrificed on the altar of Putin’s “vertical of power.” He’s enabled a handful of oligarchs to take over former state-owned corporations controlling key assets like, oil, gas and finance in return for their acquiescence in his neo-imperial adventurism.  

Now, the kleptocrats’ giant yachts have been impounded in foreign ports and Russia’s economy is contracting under pressure from international sanctions. Moscow’s European customers have sharply cut back on energy imports from Russia (gas is down by 88 percent over the past year), a vital source of the hard currency Putin needs to finance his war.

Russia’s once-imposing military reputation lies in tatters. Ukrainian defense forces are liberating large swaths of eastern and southern Ukraine, making a mockery of the Russian parliament’s vote last week to annex these regions.

Desperate to avoid a mortifying military defeat – which would likely spell the end of his rule – Putin has put Russia on a true war footing. But his attempt to draft 300,000 reservists into Russia’s demoralized army isn’t going well. Protests and violence have erupted at military recruiting centers, and Russian authorities report that about 260,000 people have fled the country since the call-up was announced.

Putin warns that he is “not bluffing” about resorting to nuclear weapons to defend “Russian” territory seized from Ukraine. But low-yield tactical nukes have little military utility since they would kill many Russian troops and pro-Russian civilians as well as Ukrainians. Breaking the nuclear taboo also would horrify the international community, including China, leaving Russia friendless except possibly for North Korea, Syria and Iran.

Is Putin really crazy enough to cross that fateful Rubicon? His bitter speech at last week’s annexation ceremony in Moscow was anything but reassuring.

It was a chauvinistic rant laced with historical fables, a warped sense of Russian victimhood and anti-American vitriol. In his telling, Ukraine is an inalienable part of Russia forcibly separated from the motherland by a “neo-Nazi coup d’etat,” which is how Putin describes the popular Maidan protests in 2014 that led to the negotiated departure of an authoritarian, pro-Russia president.  

He accused Ukraine’s government of “genocide” against Russian-speaking citizens and conspiring with a U.S.-led West bent on “total domination” of Russia. Echoing rightwing nationalists in the United States and Europe, Putin also inveighed against the West’s “radical denial of moral norms, religion and family,” likening gay and transgender rights to “outright Satanism.”

The speech, which reads like a Russian version of “Mein Kampf,” is a reminder that there are few things on Earth more dangerous than a paranoid dictator eager to avenge a humiliating national defeat – in Putin’s case, the Soviet Union’s break-up.

There’s a lesson here for U.S. foreign policy “realists.” They’ve blamed NATO’s eastward expansion, and Western moral support for pro-democracy uprisings in former Soviet states, for inflaming Putin’s bellicosity. The way to avoid trouble with Russia, they argued, is to show due respect for its “legitimate national security interests.”

In practice, this has meant caving to Putin’s demands for a free hand in controlling the destinies of neighboring countries that Moscow considers lie within its traditional sphere of interest. In Russia’s case, “realism” looks a lot like appeasement. 

Soon after taking power, Putin launched the Second Chechen war. It was a brutal war of attrition that leveled cities, indiscriminately targeted civilians and eventually pounded the breakaway former Soviet province of Chechnya into submission. That was followed by Russia’s armed interventions in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 (during which it seized Crimea) and Syria in 2015, none of which aroused more than perfunctory international criticism.

In contrast, Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February has galvanized global opposition to Russian expansionism. Ukrainians, led by the indomitable Volodymyr Zelensky, put up a determined fight for independence and have turned the tide of battle in their favor. President Biden and European leaders have shown impressive solidarity in rallying to Ukraine’s defense. Putin’s belligerence has not only revived NATO but made it bigger and brought it closer to Russia’s borders.

Whatever else he may be doing, Putin isn’t making Russia stronger. Instead, he’s reminding us that dictators are an intrinsically dangerous and destabilizing force in international affairs. They must invent or inflate foreign threats to justify their monopolization of power and repressive grip on their societies. Unaccountable at home, they feel licensed to engage in menacing and aggressive conduct abroad.

In this sense, the fundamental problem isn’t Putin’s thuggish statecraft. It’s Putinism — the tradition of autocratic rule that has long plagued Russia.

“The threat to peace and stability in Europe is aggressive imperial authoritarianism, endlessly inflicted by Russia on itself.” So says Alexei Nalvany, the intrepid leader of pro-democracy forces in Russia. For blowing the whistle on Putin and his corrupt cronies, Navalny is serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony.

The tragedy here is that Russia already is a great country— and would be greater still if its rulers trusted the Russian people to govern themselves.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).