A persistent question over the past two years has been whether Russia has transitioned from an authoritarian state to a totalitarian one. In fact, Russia is a personalist autocracy: one of the most deinstitutionalized forms of autocracy, which also include party autocracies, military juntas, and traditional monarchies. Personalist regimes tend to dismantle, subvert, or imitate institutions with the sole aim of consolidating power in the hands of a leader and his (or—far more rarely—her) closest associates.
The Russian political machine is primarily focused on self-preservation. Accepting that this is the sole raison d’être of any authoritarian rule makes it easier to think less in terms of “irrationalities,” “historic missions,” and further debris of othering, and more in terms of the simplest of rules: if an autocrat stays in power, he’s good at his job—which, again, is not rebuilding empires, promoting economic growth, or keeping his people happy. He may by turns engage in any of these, but they are the means, not the end.
The strength of a personalist autocracy lies in this consolidation of power. The drawback is that every individual is subject to the laws of nature. When the individual around whom the regime is built disappears, the country is often left in a deinstitutionalized environment, requiring the state to reinvent itself.
As a personalist autocracy, Russia is rather banal: the political history of Latin and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia teems with regime leaders who exploit their countries’ natural resources, enrich their families and cronies, give regular handouts to the poorest (purposely kept this way) to buy their loyalty, use patchwork anti-Western rhetoric that is simultaneously expansionist and isolationist, regularly reelect themselves, and remain in power for decades. Indeed, some political scientists consider autocracy to be the “natural” state of any politicum, in the same sense in which the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote about “the natural condition of mankind.” Democracy requires constant effort: it’s a complicated and often untidy system, with its checks and balances, the tiresome vigilance of its civil society, and its constant and costly electoral cycles. Leave social nature to itself, and it will devolve toward the rule of the few: so easy, so self-sustainable, and seemingly so stable—right until it’s not.
Authoritarian fragility is a difficult concept to explain to those accustomed to the outward messiness and internal regenerative power of a functional democracy. Autocracies, especially those of the contemporary “informational” type, invest a disproportionate amount of resources in presenting a suitable façade both to their own society and to the outside world. Time and again the world stands amazed over the body of another Ceausescu or witnesses the unresisted march of another Prigozhin, a couple of hundred unarmed rioters taking over an international airport guarded by the dreaded FSB, or a quiescent nation rising up as one when a dictator reelects himself for the sixth time in thirty years.
Observers at these moments are sometimes swept to the opposite extreme: the forever rulers of yesterday are considered nothing but paper tigers, and the new fear is of the boundless chaos that will engulf the formerly predictable, if inhuman, order.
A persistent Kremlin-induced narrative juxtaposes the incumbent with the chaos that could follow his departure. Yet this argument, which favors the known over the unknown, may oversimplify the complexities of the current situation. Is the incumbent truly an antidote to collapse, or might he be an unwitting agent thereof? “The devil you know” is a powerful argument, but it is too firmly in favor of the devil.
So what could survive the autocrat? Can a sustainable institution be found in a deinstitutionalized environment?
The otherwise typical Russian brand of personalist autocracy stands out as a highly statist society in which power belongs to the bureaucracy. This structure long predates the Soviet regime, going back to Peter the Great’s introduction of the Table of Ranks in 1722: a bible for Russian nobility that replaced pride of birth with pride of rank as the legitimation of the country’s gentry. Power vested in officialdom was a distinctive feature of Russia’s brand of feudalism and monarchy. Czar Nicholas I said: “It is not I who rule Russia. It is the 30,000 clerks.” This might be taken for an autocrat’s coquetry, but Russia is indeed a country with a long and rich history of respect for rank.
In today’s Russia, power belongs to this generalized bureaucracy, which can be federal, regional, or local. There is also a large community of siloviki (law enforcement, security services, and the military bureaucracy).
Despite popular comparisons of the Russian president to a czar and his entourage to a court, Russia does not truly exhibit the characteristics of monarchies. In Russia, a person’s importance is determined by their position. Those who hold power in the Russian system are heads of ministries, government, state corporations, or state banks.
After 2014, there was a significant increase in the number of civil servants in Russia, particularly at the regional level and in the regional branches of federal services, ministries, and agencies. This also included those employed by corporations, state banks, state media, and so on.
Those who work for the state form the core of the regime. They are well off and their incomes are stable. This stability and security ensure their allegiance to the status quo. By the end of the 2010s, the Russian state had become a dominant, if not the most important, job provider.
This expansive state machine is adept at creating loyalties, but its effectiveness is questionable. In every informational autocracy, particularly in Russia, there’s a distinct conflict between appearance and reality. The invasion of Ukraine launched by Russia acted as a significant stress test for its system of governance.
The system found itself in a situation for which it was unprepared and unsuited. Now the entire political system is using all its resources to pretend that everything is normal and to convey this self-contradictory message to the people.
It soon became apparent that the parts of the state machine in which it had taken the most pride, identified with, and invested had not served it as well as expected. Some, like the military intelligence, secret services, and the military itself, demonstrated their deficiencies immediately. Others, like the extensive and well-funded propaganda machine, faltered over time, with audiences shifting from TV to the Telegram messaging app and YouTube.
Interestingly, the parts of this machine that have proved to be resilient and effective, ultimately saving the day, are the very sectors often suspected of being “liberal at heart,” “potential fifth column,” or “pro-Western.” The civic bureaucracy, particularly the financial and economic authorities, regional bureaucracy, private business, and banking sector, have shown resilience due to their adaptability.
There is a familiar pattern in the way the governmental machine reacts to the demands of the political leadership, from proposals to restrict freedom of movement reminiscent of Russian serfdom to ideas for financially punishing emigrants who continue to work or have property and bank accounts in Russia. This pattern consists of superficial consent, hollowing out the measures proposed, and slow implementation, in the hope that the idea will die a natural death as the leadership forgets about it in pursuit of some other novelty.
It should be noted that in both implementing and failing to implement measures that should help the system to survive, the bigger fear is not public protest or discontent, but administrative dysfunction: that the authorities should proclaim something and nothing follows. This is what happened in the late Soviet Union, and in the elitist worldview of the Russian ruling class, any mass protest or public disobedience is what follows this administrative impotence, not what causes it.
Evidently, the Russian state mechanism has not yet evolved to the stage where the preservation of the status quo has lost value for the elites and they opt for change because the status quo is perceived as unsustainable. The current stance could be described as the rational part of the bureaucracy trying to preserve the functionality of the regime despite the best efforts of the leadership to unsettle it. Yet it is precisely the passivity of the elites and their proclivity for the “wait and see” tactic that pose a threat to the regime in the event of any external or internal shock: when no one protests or even objects, but nor does anyone do anything to help. The system came dangerously close to this state during the short-lived mutiny by the mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier this year.
It was the president’s decision to allow unprecedented license—including open access to convicts as free cannon fodder—to a private military company that has no legal status within the pale of Russian law and whose every activity is criminal. If the idea was to provide a counterbalance to the regular military’s inevitable excess of influence in wartime, it backfired spectacularly, all but bringing down the system. The state failed to defeat the uprising using the instruments of order: it had to rely first on behind-the-scenes deals and undignified appeasement, and then on dousing the fire of illegitimate violence with the petrol of an even more outrageous and theatrical violence when Prigozhin’s plane was shot out of the sky.
The system formed to a large extent under the current president is trying desperately to survive, and in places (such as the financial-economic bloc), it’s not doing a bad job. It still seems collectively to consider the preservation of the status quo, however risky and devoid of prospects, as preferable to the dangers of attempted change. Yet this precarious balance is being recalculated daily by actors and interest groups who cannot fail to realize that, for better or worse, the “Putin era” is entering its final stage, however drawn out that stage may be.
Bureaucratic structures in Russia often house experienced professionals in a range of fields. The social and financial advantages of positions in the finance and economic ministries and regional governments, along with the need to contribute substantively, have prevented negative selection. This contrasts with the top echelons of the siloviki, where impunity, lack of accountability, and the constant rewarding of loyalty over competence have yielded the opposite effect. It is conceivable that the country’s ruling mechanism—bureaucratic institutions—may outlast the personalism that has been both a burden and an asset. This vast network of civil servants, technocrats, and administrators forms a modestly resilient framework that endures beyond individual political decisions, providing continuity and ensuring the steady day-to-day functioning of the government.
