Don t Make Come Down There Again

Could Putin actually fall?

What history teaches us about how autocrats lose power — and how Putin might hang on.

Past Mar 13, 2022, seven:00am EDT

Christina Animashaun/Vocalisation

As Russian federation'due south war in Ukraine looks increasingly disastrous, speculation has mounted that President Vladimir Putin'south misstep could prove to exist his downfall. A litany of pundits and experts have predicted that frustration with the war's costs and crushing economical sanctions could lead to the collapse of his government.

"Vladimir Putin'south attack on Ukraine will result in the downfall of him and his friends," David Rothkopf declared in the Daily Animal. "If history is any guide, his overreach and his miscalculations, his weaknesses as a strategist, and the flaws in his character will undo him."

But what events could actually bring downwardly Putin? And how likely might they be in the foreseeable future?

The best research on how authoritarians fall points to two possible scenarios: a war machine coup or a popular uprising. During the Cold War, coups were the more common mode for dictators to be forced out of part — think the toppling of Argentina's Juan Perón in 1955. But since the 1990s, there has been a shift in the style that authoritarians are removed. Coups have been on the reject while popular revolts, like the Arab Spring uprisings and "colour revolutions" in the former Soviet Union, take been on the rise.

For all the speculation about Putin losing power, neither of these eventualities seems particularly likely in Russia — even after the disastrous initial invasion of Ukraine. This is in no modest part considering Putin has washed about equally good a job preparing for them every bit any dictator could.

Over the past 2 decades, the Russian leader and his allies have structured nearly every core chemical element of the Russian state with an eye toward limiting threats to the regime. Putin has arrested or killed leading dissidents, instilled fright in the general public, and made the land's leadership class dependent on his goodwill for their continued prosperity. His power to rapidly ramp upward repression during the electric current crisis in response to antiwar protests — using tactics ranging from mass arrests at protests to shutting down opposition media to cutting off social media platforms — is a sit-in of the regime'due south strengths.

"Putin has prepared for this eventuality for a long time, and has taken a lot of concerted actions to make sure he's not vulnerable," says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral beau at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russian federation and the one-time communist bloc.

Withal at the aforementioned time, scholars of authoritarianism and Russian politics are not fully set up to rule out Putin's fall. Unlikely is not impossible; the experts I spoke with generally believe the Ukraine invasion to have been a strategic blunder that raised the risks of both a coup and a revolution, fifty-fifty if their probability remains depression in absolute terms.

"Before [the war], the risk from either of those threats was shut to cipher. And now the hazard in both of those respects is certainly higher," says Brian Taylor, a professor at Syracuse University and author of The Code of Putinism.

Ukrainians and their Western sympathizers cannot bank on Putin'south downfall. But if the state of war proves even more disastrous for Russian federation'south president than it already seems, history tells united states of america there are pathways for even the well-nigh entrenched autocrats to lose their grip on power.

Christina Animashaun/Phonation

Could the Ukraine state of war could cause a armed services coup?

In a recent advent on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) hitting upon what he saw equally a solution to the Ukraine war — for someone, maybe "in the Russian military," to remove Vladimir Putin by assassination or a coup. "The only style this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out," the senator argued.

He shouldn't get his hopes up. A military defection against Putin is more possible at present than it was before the invasion of Ukraine, but the odds against information technology remain long.

Naunihal Singh is one of the world'due south leading scholars of military coups. His 2017 volume Seizing Ability uses statistical analysis, game theory, and historical case studies to endeavour to figure out what causes coups and what makes them likely to succeed.

Singh finds that militaries are most likely to attempt coups in low-income countries, regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic, and nations where coups accept recently happened. None of these conditions use very well to modern Russian federation, a firmly authoritarian middle-income country that hasn't seen a coup attempt since the early '90s.

But at the aforementioned time, wars like Putin'southward can breed resentment and fearfulness in the ranks, precisely the conditions under which we've seen coups in other countries. "At that place are reasons why Putin might be increasingly concerned here," Singh says, pointing to coups in Republic of mali in 2012 and Burkina Faso earlier this yr as precedent. Indeed, a 2022 written report of civil wars found that coups are more than probable to happen during conflicts when governments face stronger opponents — suggesting that wartime deaths and defeat actually exercise raise the odds of military mutinies.

In Singh's view, the Ukraine conflict raises the odds of a coup in Russia for two reasons: Information technology could weaken the armed services leadership's allegiance to Putin, and information technology could provide an unusual opportunity to plan a move against him.

The motive for Russian officers to launch a coup would be fairly straightforward: The plush Ukraine entrada becomes unpopular among, and even personally threatening to, fundamental members of the military.

Leading Russian journalists and experts have warned that Putin is surrounded by a shrinking bubble of hawkish yes-men who feed his nationalist obsessions and tell him only what he wants to hear. This very small group drew upwardly an invasion plan that assumed the Ukrainian military would put up minimal resistance, allowing Russia to speedily seize Kyiv and install a puppet regime.

This plan both underestimated Ukraine'due south resolve and overestimated the competence of the Russian armed services, leading to significant Russian casualties and a failed early push toward the Ukrainian capital. Since so, Russian forces have been bogged down in a slow and plush conflict defined by horrific bombardments of populated areas. International sanctions have been far harsher than the Kremlin expected, sending the Russian economy into a tailspin and specifically punishing its elite's ability to appoint in commerce abroad.

Co-ordinate to Farida Rustamova, a Russian reporter well-sourced in the Kremlin, loftier-ranking civilian officials in the Russian government are already unhappy about the war and its economic consequences. Ane can only imagine the sentiment among military officers, few of whom announced to have been informed of the war plans beforehand — and many of whom are now tasked with killing Ukrainians en masse.

Layered on acme of that is something that often can precipitate coups: personal insecurity amongst loftier-ranking generals and intelligence officers. Co-ordinate to Andrei Soldatov, a Russian federation expert at the Eye for European Policy Assay think tank, Putin is punishing loftier-ranking officials in the FSB — the successor agency to the KGB — for the war'due south early failures. Soldatov's sources say that Putin has placed Sergei Beseda, the leader of the FSB's foreign intelligence branch, nether house abort (as well as his deputy).

Reports like this are hard to verify. Just they rails with Singh's predictions that poor performance in wars generally leads autocrats to discover someone to blame — and that fear of penalty could convince some among Russian federation's security elite that the best way to protect themselves is to get rid of Putin.

Rosgvardiya (Russian National Guard) servicemen detain a demonstrator during a protest in Moscow against Russia'southward invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

"I don't call back Putin will electrocute them, but they may still accept to live in fear and humiliation," Singh says. "They'll be afraid for their own futures."

The conflict as well provides disgruntled officials with an opening. In authoritarian countries similar Russia, generals don't e'er have many opportunities to speak with one some other without fear of surveillance or informants. Wars change that, at to the lowest degree somewhat.

There are now "lots of good reasons for generals to be in a room with key players and even to evade surveillance by the state, since they will want to evade NATO and U.s. surveillance," Singh explains.

That said, coups are famously difficult to pull off. And the Russian security state in detail is organized effectually a frustrating one.

Contrary to most people'southward expectations, successful war machine coups are generally pretty bloodless; smart plotters typically don't launch if they believe in that location'south a real take chances information technology'll come downwardly to a gun boxing in the presidential palace. Instead, they ensure they take overwhelming support from the armed forces in the capital — or at least tin convince everyone that they do — before they make their move.

And on that front end, Russian federation experts say Putin has done a bang-up job of what political scientists call "insurrection-proofing" his regime. He has seeded the war machine with counterintelligence officers, making it hard for potential mutineers to know whom to trust. He has delegated main responsibility for repression at home to security agencies other than the regular war machine, which both physically distances troops from Moscow and reduces an incentive to insubordinate (orders to kill one'southward own people being quite unpopular in the ranks).

He has also intensified the coup coordination problem past splitting upward the country security services into dissimilar groups led by trusted allies. In 2016, Putin created the Russian National Guard — as well chosen the Rosgvardiya — as an entity carve up from the armed forces. Under the command of thuggish Putin loyalist Viktor Zolotov, it performs internal security tasks similar border security and counterterrorism in conjunction with Russian federation'south intelligence services.

These services are divide into four federal branches. Three of these — the FSB, GRU, and SVR — take their own elite special operations forces. The fourth, the Federal Protection Services, is Russian federation's Clandestine Service equivalent with a twist: It has in the range of twenty,000 officers, co-ordinate to a 2013 guess. Past contrast, the Clandestine Service has about 4,500, in a land with a population roughly three times Russian federation'southward. This allows the Federal Protection Services to function as a kind of Praetorian Guard that can protect Putin from assassins and coups alike.

The event is that the regular military, the almost powerful of Russia'southward armed factions, does not necessarily dominate Russia's internal security mural. Whatever successful plot would probable crave complex coordination among members of dissimilar agencies who may not know each other well or trust each other very much. In a government known to be shot through with potential informers, that'south a powerful disincentive confronting a coup.

"The coordination dilemma ... is especially severe when you accept multiple different intelligence agencies and ways of monitoring the war machine finer, which the Russians do," Casey explains. "There's just a lot of different failsafe measures that Putin has built over the years that are oriented toward preventing a coup."

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Dreams of a Russian uprising — but tin it happen?

In an interview on the New York Times's Sway podcast, onetime FBI special agent Clint Watts warned of casualties in the Ukraine state of war leading to some other Russian revolution.

"The mothers in Russia have always been the pushback confronting Putin during these conflicts. This is going to be side by side-level calibration," he argued. "Nosotros're worried virtually Kyiv falling today. I'm worried virtually Moscow falling betwixt twenty-four hour period 30 and half-dozen months from at present."

A revolution against Putin has get likelier since the war began; in fact, it's probably more than plausible than a coup. In the 21st century, we have seen more popular uprisings in post-Soviet countries — similar Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine itself — than nosotros have coups. Despite that, the best evidence suggests the odds of one erupting in Russia are however fairly low.

Few scholars are more than influential in this field than Harvard'southward Erica Chenoweth. Their finding, in work with swain political scientist Maria Stephan, that nonviolent protest is more likely to topple regimes than an armed uprising is ane of the rare political science claims to take transcended academia, becoming a staple of op-eds and activist rhetoric.

When Chenoweth looks at the situation in Russia today, they annotation that the longstanding appearance of stability in Putin's Russian federation might be deceiving.

"Russia has a long and storied legacy of civil resistance [movements]," Chenoweth tells me. "Unpopular wars accept precipitated 2 of them."

Here, Chenoweth is referring to ii early-20th-century uprisings against the czars: the 1905 insurgence that led to the creation of the Duma, Russia's legislature; and the more famous 1917 revolution that gave us the Soviet Union. Both events were triggered in pregnant part by Russian wartime losses (in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively). And indeed, we accept seen notable dissent already during the electric current conflict, including demonstrations in nearly 70 Russian cities on March 6 lone.

It'due south conceivable that these protests grow if the war continues to become poorly, specially if it produces significant Russian casualties, clear evidence of mass atrocities confronting civilians, and continued deep economical pain from sanctions. But nosotros are however very far from a mass insurgence.

Chenoweth's research suggests y'all need to get almost 3.5 pct of the population involved in protests to guarantee some kind of government concession. In Russia, that translates to about 5 1000000 people. The antiwar protests haven't reached anything even close to that calibration, and Chenoweth is non willing to predict that it'due south likely for them to approach it.

"It is hard to organize sustained collective protest in Russian federation," they notation. "Putin's government has criminalized many forms of protests, and has close downward or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to exist in opposition or associated with the West."

Protesters clash with police in Independence Foursquare in Kyiv on Feb 20, 2014. Demonstrators were calling for the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych over corruption and an abandoned trade agreement with the EU.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A mass revolution, like a coup, is something that Putin has been preparing to confront for years. Past some accounts, it has been his number one fearfulness since the Arab Spring and especially the 2013 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine. The repressive barriers Chenoweth points out are significant, making information technology unlikely — though, once again, non impossible — that the antiwar protests evolve into a movement that topples Putin, even during a time of heightened stress for the regime.

In an disciplinarian society like Russian federation, the government's willingness to arrest, torture, and kill dissidents creates a similar coordination problem as the one insurrection plotters feel —only on a grander scale. Instead of needing to get a small cabal of military machine and intelligence officers to risk death, leaders need to convince thousands of ordinary citizens to do the same.

In by revolutions, opposition-controlled media outlets and social media platforms have helped solve this difficulty. But during the war, Putin has shut downwardly notable independent media outlets and cracked down on social media, restricting Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram access. He has also introduced emergency measures that punish the spread of "false" information most the war by up to xv years in jail, leading even international media outlets like the New York Times to pull their local staff. Antiwar protesters accept been arrested en masse.

About Russians get their news from government-run media, which have been serving up a steady diet of pro-war propaganda. Many of them appear to genuinely believe information technology: An independent opinion poll found that 58 per centum of Russians supported the war to at least some degree.

"What these polls reflect is how many people actually melody in to country media, which tells them what to think and what to say," Russian announcer Alexey Kovalyov tells my colleague Sean Illing.

The dauntless protesters in Russian cities prove that the regime grip on the information environment isn't closed. But for this dissent to evolve into something bigger, Russian activists will need to effigy out a broader style to get around censorship, government agitprop, and repression. That'southward not easy to practice, and requires skilled activists. Chenoweth's research, and the literature on ceremonious resistance more broadly, finds that the tactical choices of opposition activists take a tremendous impact on whether the protesters ultimately succeed in their aims.

Organizers demand to "give people a range of tactics they can participate in, because not everyone is going to want to protest given the circumstances. Just people may be willing to boycott or do other things that announced to have lower risk just still accept a significant impact, " says Hardy Merriman, a senior advisor to the International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict.

You can already see some tactical inventiveness at piece of work. Alexis Lerner, a scholar of dissent in Russian federation at the US Naval Academy, tells me that Russians are using unconventional methods like graffiti and TikTok videos to become effectually the state's censorship and coercive apparatus. She likewise notes that an unusual amount of criticism of the government has come from loftier-profile Russians, ranging from oligarchs to social media stars.

But at the aforementioned time, you tin too see the issue of the past decades of repression at work. During his time in power, Putin has systematically worked to marginalize and repress anyone he identifies as a potential threat. At the highest level, this means attacking and imprisoning prominent dissenters like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Alexei Navalny.

Opposition supporters attend an unauthorized anti-Putin rally called by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Saint petersburg, Russia, on May 5, 2018, two days ahead of Vladimir Putin's inauguration for a quaternary Kremlin term.

Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Simply the repression as well extends down the social nutrient chain, from journalists to activists on down to ordinary Russians who may have dabbled also much in politics. The result is that anti-Putin forces are extremely depleted, with many Putin opponents operating in exile fifty-fifty before the Ukraine conflict began.

Moreover, revolutions don't generally succeed without elite action. The prototypical success of a revolutionary protest movement is not the storming of the Bastille but the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. In that example, Mubarak'south security forces refused to repress the protesters and pressured him to resign as they continued.

"Symbolic protest is usually not enough to bring about change," Chenoweth explains. "What makes such movements succeed is the ability to create, facilitate, or precipitate shifts in the loyalty of the pillars of support, including military and security elites, state media, oligarchs, and Putin'south inner circle of political assembly."

Given the Russian president's level of control over his security establishment, it will take a truly massive protest movement to wedge them autonomously.

What are the odds of regime change in Russia?

It can be difficult to talk about low-probability events like the collapse of the Putin regime. Suggesting that it'due south possible tin come across as suggesting it's likely; suggesting it'southward unlikely can come across as suggesting information technology's impossible.

But information technology's important to run into a gray area here: accepting that Putin's end is more likely than it was on February 23, the twenty-four hours before Russia launched its offensive, but still significantly less probable than his government continuing to muddle through. The war has put new pressure on the regime, at both the elite and the mass public level, just the fact remains that Putin's Russian federation is an extremely effective autocracy with strong guardrails against coups and revolutions.

So how should nosotros remember most the odds? Is information technology closer to xx percent — or ane per centum?

This kind of question is impossible to answer with annihilation like precision. The data surroundings is then murky, due to both Russian censorship and the fog of war, that it's difficult to discern basic facts like the actual number of Russian war dead. We don't really have a good sense of how fundamental members of the Russian security establishment are feeling about the state of war or whether the people trying to organize mass protests are talented enough to go around aggressive repression.

And the near-future effects of key policies are similarly unclear. Take international sanctions. We know that these measures take had a devastating effect on the Russian economy. What nosotros don't know is who the Russian public will blame for their immiseration: Putin for launching the war — or America and its allies for imposing the sanctions? Can reality pierce through Putin'southward control of the data surroundings? The answers to these questions will make a huge departure.

Putin built his legitimacy effectually the idea of restoring Russia's stability, prosperity, and global standing. Past threatening all 3, the war in Ukraine is shaping upwardly to be the greatest test of his regime to date.

Correction, March xiii, nine:55 am: An earlier version of this piece mistakenly included the toppling of Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh on a list of a dictatorships brought down past a coup rather than Cold War coups in general. He was a democratically elected prime minister who governed from 1951 to 1953, before he was ousted by a coup, with back up from US and British intelligence.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/22961563/putin-russia-ukraine-coup-revolution-invasion

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