The Putin Predicament E-Book

Bo Petersson

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Using the Russian president’s major public addresses as the main source, Bo Petersson analyzes the legitimization strategies employed during Vladimir Putin’s third and fourth terms in office. The argument is that these strategies have rested on Putin’s highly personalized blend of strongman-image projection and presentation as the embodiment of Russia’s great power myth. Putin appears as the only credible guarantor against renewed weakness, political chaos, and interference from abroad—in particular from the US. After a first deep crisis of legitimacy manifested itself by the massive protests in 2011–2012, the annexation of Crimea led to a lengthy boost in Putin’s popularity figures. The book discusses how the Crimea effect is, by 2021, trailing off and Putin’s charismatic authority is increasingly questioned by opposition from Alexei Navalny, the effects of unpopular reforms, and poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, Russia is bound to head for a succession crisis as the legitimacy of the political system continues to be built on Putin’s projected personal characteristics and—now apparently waning—charisma, and since no potential heir apparent has been allowed on center stage. The constitutional reform of summer 2020 made it possible in theory for Putin to continue as president until 2036. Yet, this change did not address the Russian political system’s fundamental future leadership dilemma.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Foreword

Preface and Acknowledgments

I Introduction

The ratings problem

Main material

Delimitations

Transliteration of Russian words and names

II Theoretical Points of Orientation

Political succession

Legitimacy

Legitimacy in non-democratic states

Charisma and routinization

Legitimacy and political myth

III Legitimizing Putin

The 2011-2012 legitimation crisis

Re-legitimization: Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea

Strength and stability

The great power myth

Getting out of troubles: the smuta myth

Dynamic interplay: the phoenix myth

The bulwark and its champion

The man of action

Great communicator, benevolent ruler

Putin the populist

Putin the common Russian

IV Legitimacy through Othering

Othering and Russia

Relations with the United States

Dealing with Trump

Enter Joe Biden

No more the underdog

Paradigm shift and saber-rattling

V Challenges from Within

Electoral authoritarianism in Russia

The presidential elections of 2018

The Navalny challenge

Medvedev’s downfall

Navalny vs. Putin

The fall guy function

Stability and order

The good tsar

VI Challenge from Without

The corona crisis: devolving power

Entering center stage—and exiting again

The Sputnik V vaccine

Faring better than the West?

Skewing the statistics

The pandemic and the image

VII The Succession Issue

Looking to the East?

Guarantor of the constitution?

Successions in the Russian post-Soviet past

Post-Soviet precedents

Postponing the succession: the constitutional reform

VIII Conclusion

References

Foreword

Authoritarian legitimacy is notoriously difficult to observe. While autocrats always insist upon their legitimacy, the ever-present threat of coercion and sanction makes it difficult to know whether their claims are broadly supported in society. Scholars thus tend to distinguish between legitimacy as a diffuse property claimed by rulers and their supporters and legitimation as an ongoing process of legitimacy-seeking (usually in the form of claim-making).

Researching legitimacy—that is, societal acceptance of a ruler’s right to rule—is complicated by a variety of factors and biases, not least of which being the well-known problem of “preference falsification”—or when citizens conceal their private views on a regime while presenting a public appearance of loyalty (Kuran 1995). Even in semi-autocracies and hybrid regimes, privately-held preferences may be concealed even from neutral observers (including pollsters) on the assumption that they might be allied with the regime.

Arguably, the difficulty of closing the gap between public and private preferences is one of the core reasons that regime change in authoritarian regimes appears surprising. Hence, preference falsification is not just a problem for social scientists but also for autocrats who deliberately cultivate ignorance about the inner workings of their regimes—in other words, autocracies are “engines of agnatology” (Ahram and Goode 2016). A consequence of this “structural opacity” (Schedler 2013) is autocrats’ uncertainty about the information provided by subordinates as well as citizens. Today’s Russia exemplifies the difficulties created by the structural opacity of autocratic rule. Throughout the 2000s, the Kremlin relentlessly surveyed society to watch for potential sources of grievance that could turn into protest movements. Some observers even mocked the regime’s obsession with public opinion, calling it a “ratingocracy.” Yet this approach to “managed democracy” (upravliaemaia demokratiia) failed to anticipate the popular resonance of the protests “For Fair Elections” that followed the combination of fraudulent 2011 parliamentary elections along with Putin’s announced intention to return to the presidency for a third term in 2012.

The start of Putin’s third term after the 2011-2012 protests signaled an important change in the nature of the regime. Rather than seeking better information about Russians’ true sentiments, it embraced structural opacity and escalated its information warfare against domestic and international audiences, flooding the airwaves, press, and social media with a mixture of pro-government propaganda, anti-Westernism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Consistent with broader trends among authoritarian states worldwide, Russia’s leaders became “informational autocrats” (Guriev and Treisman 2019), preferring to manipulate and divide while mimicking democracy. The new approach did not necessarily improve the Kremlin’s knowledge of societal preferences, though its control of public narratives and deft use of supportive political myths presented a powerful façade of stability and competence for mass consumption. The surge of popular support for Putin following the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 seemed to confirm the effectiveness of the new approach.

The legitimation strategies adopted in Putin’s third and fourth terms were not mere window dressing, though some have argued that ideas and legitimation matter little for understanding the underlying dynamics of autocratization in Russia. They are not alone, as the comparative study of authoritarianism tends to emphasize coercion and co-optation rather than ideational sources of power. To be sure, the post-2012 shift towards informational autocracy was made possible by the prior centralization of power, weakening of independent journalism and civil society, and the cowing of Russia’s oligarchs during Putin’s first two terms in office. And yet even these crucial de-democratizing moves benefited from claims to performance legitimacy arising from steady economic growth and the regime’s exploitation of the smuta myth of the 1990s as a cautionary tale about the dangerous excesses of democracy. Simultaneously, the Kremlin invested in patriotic education throughout the 2000s, reviving a Soviet-style military patriotism fused with conservative and orthodox religious themes that were mobilized in concert with watershed events of 2014, dovetailing with the myth of Russia rising from its knees to regain its rightful place as a great power under Putin’s guidance. From the start, then, the politics of legitimation and power politics have been intertwined in Putin’s regime.

From a comparative perspective, the challenge in researching the politics of legitimation in autocracies is two-fold: first, one must identify the regime’s legitimating strategies and what they reveal about the nature of the regime; second, the effectiveness of the legitimating strategies needs to be assessed, including their implications for consolidating (or enforcing) loyalty among both elites and citizens.

Bo Petersson’s book masterfully addresses the first challenge, using public statements, interviews, and other open sources to meticulously unravel the varieties of political myths and how they evolved in response to the existential crisis faced by Putin’s regime in 2011-2012. In picking apart the legitimating claims and their roles in contemporary politics, the problem of succession looms large: political myths reinforce Putin’s place at the apex of Russian politics but also traps him there as long as his charismatic authority remains non-transferable to other actors. Putin’s personal popularity might be genuine, but it does not transfer to other ruling institutions or parties. The 2020 constitutional amendments1 institutionalized elements of the regime’s legitimating myths (not just in terms of their contents, but also the very process of adopting them), but paradoxically they reinforced Putin’s personal power rather than routinizing his charismatic authority. It has long been speculated that Putin has the proverbial tiger by its tail. Petersson’s analysis demonstrates clearly why this is the case, particularly as illustrated by the challenge posed by Alexei Navalny—though the challenge is intrinsic to Putin’s regime, and one could further adduce the 2015 assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov to the Kremlin’s inability to find a solution.

The second challenge—that of assessing the effectiveness of legitimating strategies—is no less complicated. The public artefacts (in this case, interviews, statements, and public performances) created by authoritarian regimes might reveal the nature of the regime and its limits, but they are not necessarily reliable guides to their inner workings. The pitfalls in analyzing them are many. The intent behind a regime message is difficult to divine, often leading pundits to attempt to analyze Putin’s psychology. Whatever the intent of a regime message or claim, it may differ significantly from its effect. When politics are pointedly kept opaque, regime subordinates and citizens, alike, attempt to grasp the meaning behind messages and policies, inevitably leading to misinterpretations and unintended consequences. The mimicking of legitimating narratives may equally provide cover for covert forms of resistance or for bureaucratic incompetence of the sort ruthlessly mocked by Russian satirists from Nikolai Gogol’ to Vladimir Voinovich.

Scholars must resist the temptation to infer the effectiveness of a legitimating strategy from a ruler’s duration in power or, for that matter, from the absence of overt challenges to a ruler’s power.2 Correspondingly, the notion of successful legitimation needs to be unpacked and conceptualized such that it entails more than regime survival. One possibility might be to consider how the politics of legitimation regulate elite competition, determine access to resources, and structure career trajectories. Alternatively, one could examine the range of possible explanations for the absence of open challenges and their points of intersection with the regime’s legitimating myths. Still another would be to examine the legitimating narratives that have been abandoned, re-tooled, or held in reserve. Of particular interest in this regard are legitimating fields like gender and nationalism that may be exploited by both regime and opposition.

The difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of legitimation strategies is especially pressing as Putin’s regime has reached an impasse. The “Putin predicament,” in Petersson’s felicitous shorthand, is a multifaceted challenge that is rising to the surface in Russia. Almost immediately following his re-election to a fourth term in 2018, the Russian press was flooded with stories confirming his intent to remain in office indefinitely—a claim that appears ensured with the passage of the 2020 constitutional amendments. While Putin’s lingering in power may be a comfort to Russia’s elite, Petersson convincingly illustrates that his reputation as a great communicator has suffered with age and the waning of the so-called Crimean consensus in public opinion. In the wake of Putin’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the poisoning and arrest of Navalny, the absence of alternatives bears clear implications for domestic stability and even international security that are likely to persist. The materials and analysis in Petersson’s book are thus a valuable resource—not just for understanding the politics of legitimation during Putin’s third and fourth terms, but also for future research on legitimation in Russia and other autocracies.

J. Paul Goode

Carleton University

June 2021

REFERENCES

Ahram, A. I., Goode, J. P. (2016) ‘Researching Authoritarianism in the Discipline of Democracy’, Social Science Quarterly, 97, 834–849.

Guriev, S., Treisman, D. (2019) ‘Informational Autocrats’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33, 100–127.

Kuran, T. (1995) Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences ofPreference Falsification, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pomeranz, W. E., Smyth, R. (2021, eds) ‘Russia’s 2020 Constitutional Reform: The Politics of Institutionalizing the Status-Quo’, Russian Politics, 6: 1, 1-152.

Schedler, A. (2013) The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and SubvertingElectoral Authoritarianism, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

1 For a detailed discussion of the amendments and the process of their adoption, see Pomeranz and Smyth 2021.

2 At the same time, those who would deconstruct the ideational sources of the regime’s power must be mindful of the practical and ethical difficulties posed by autocracies for those who would study them, including for one’s respondents, colleagues, and students.

 

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book has been long in the making. For several years during my academic career, I devoted myself to university management matters, and the little time that I had available for research went into the writing of shorter texts to keep the kettle boiling at least to some extent. This was in a way also a necessity, since my generation of social scientists has had to re-learn, from knowing that it was the writing of monographs that mattered into the new wisdom that only peer-reviewed articles in high impact journals count. Having reached a mature age and being at the stage of my academic career when I can afford the luxury of writing what I want rather than what I should, I have now finally wrapped up this book project. That is a rewarding feeling.

Several people have helped me along the final stretch of the road, and I am indebted to them all. I would like to thank the following colleagues and friends who have read the manuscript, made comments, and contributed to its improvement. Heartfelt thanks therefore go to Anders Blixt, Richard Brander, Derek Stanford Hutcheson, Kalle Kniivilä, Inger Sjunnesson, Andreas Umland, and Carolina Vendil Pallin. Of course, the responsibility for remaining flaws and shortcomings remains solely my own. I would also like to express my appreciation to Jean Hudson for her careful language editing of my text, and to J. Paul Goode for kindly agreeing to write the foreword. Thanks also to Pelle Mickwitz and, again, Richard Brander who have provided regular pep talk and general inspiration during our Thursday night zoom seminars all through the dark and gloomy years of the pandemic. My sincerest thanks go to my family, to Sanja, Teodor and Isidor, who have accepted my reclusive behavior and long evenings in the study without holding them too much against me. Without their moral support and understanding, I would never have been able to finish the book.

IIntroduction

Because princes are of short life, it must be that the kingdom will fail soon, as his virtue fails. Hence it arises that kingdoms that depend solely on the virtue of one man are hardly durable, because that virtue fails with the life of that one; and it rarely happens that it is restored by succession(Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I 11: 4, 35-36).

I have invariably proceeded from the premise that I need to be doing what I believe to be right for our country. When I do something, I do it not for the sake of pleasing someone abroad(Vladimir Putin, News Conference, 17 December 2020).

Is it possible to imagine contemporary Russia without Vladimir Putin as its leader? The present Speaker of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, then deputy chief of staff of the Russian president, was very clear about the answer when he asserted that without Putin there would be no Russia (Moscow Times 2014). For those who are in their early twenties or younger, the question seems justified, as there has simply been no other Russian leader around for as long as they can remember. There certainly was the bracketed president and former prime minister, Dimitriy Medvedev, but not even when he was president between the years of 2008 and 2012 did the public take him seriously. Everybody knew who was pulling the strings, his prime minister at the time, Vladimir Putin.

Since the last year of the 1990s, Putin has held a unique position at the center stage of Russian politics, either as president or as prime minister. His personal popularity may have had some temporary dips, most obviously in connection with the “farcical” (Hanson 2011: 34-35) or even “callous and casual” (Koesel and Bunce 2012: 417) transfer of presidential power from Medvedev and back again to Putin in 2011-2012, but overall, the sustenance of his popularity has been remarkable. Halfway through his fourth presidential period in office it may finally start to wear thin, but there is no doubt that it has proven remarkably sturdy for more than two decades. It is the endeavor of this book to try to find explanations for this durability but also to discuss what dilemmas Putin’s unique and total dominance have given rise to and are likely to engender in the future.

In general terms, this book is focused on the concept of legitimacy and its application in the hybrid authoritarian political setting that contemporary Russia represents. More specifically, it will discuss legitimization strategies employed during the Putin era, with special attention to the strategies used from Putin’s third presidential tenure onwards. In more straightforward terms the research questions that the book seeks to answer are therefore: How has Putin’s legitimacy been constructed and sustained during his third and fourth terms in office? What challenges are there to his legitimacy as a political leader? How is the question of political succession dealt with? What problems may the legitimization strategies employed during Putin’s long incumbency bring for his future successor?

There are several reasons for the focus on Putin’s third and fourth terms in office. First, the 2011-2012 events brought about an unprecedented legitimization crisis for the Putin regime. Declining approval rates for Putin indicated this. They hit a low and remained at that level until early 2014 when they were boosted again after the support of the insurgency in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. The re-legitimation strategies used by the regime during Putin’s third and fourth periods in office were a mixture of old and new, but the new elements were so assertive as to warrant the label of “high Putinism” for the political period that they marked.

In view of the content and style characterizing foreign policy actions and domestic politics from 2014 onwards, Putin’s third and fourth periods in office can be regarded as qualitatively different from his first two presidential terms between 2000 and 2008. Indeed, in the words of one prominent analyst, Russia at the time of the crisis of legitimation in 2011-2012 and Russia from the time of the annexation of Crimea onwards are “like two different countries, belonging to different historical eras and separated not merely by a few years but by decades, if not centuries” (Sharafutdinova 2020: 4).

In non-democratic systems, legitimacy and issues of succession to the next generation of political leaders are two sides of the same coin (Snyder 2018). This is another reason why the empirical focus of the book is on the third and fourth presidential tenures of Vladimir Putin. Succession issues were not very relevant during his first two presidencies, as the incumbent himself was then relatively young and the constitutional limitations to a prolongation beyond the second term in office were still not overtrodden. Towards the end of his second term in office many observers tended to believe that the two Putin terms were to be followed by two Medvedev terms, whereafter a third actor would enter the stage, much like in democratic systems. These pundits turned out to be deeply mistaken.

As this book nears completion, during the first part of 2021 and halfway through Putin’s fourth presidential term, succession issues are still not on the agenda, at least not officially. In 2020, constitutional amendments were hurried through and adopted to get rid of a succession dilemma which consisted in the fact that, on the one hand, the incumbent president due to constitutional regulations would have to leave office in 2024, while, on the other hand, he had no credible candidates to succeed him. The constitutional amendments fixed part of the problem as they made it possible for Putin to stay on for two more tenures, up until the year of 2036, should he and the electorate so wish, and his health so permit. However, this did not change the basic problem, as the succession issues continued to simmer below the surface. Putin, born in 1952, is certainly not getting any younger. Things may happen along the way as they are prone to do in life, and the setup of presidential contenders seeking to fill any political vacuum is still conspicuous by its absence. This is the Putin predicament: It is time for him to go, but there is no one in sight to succeed him. Moreover, as will be made clear in this book, it will be very difficult for anyone to succeed him as current strategies of legitimation have been almost exclusively focused on his person.

The crisis of 2011-2012, when Putin was reinstated as president after Medvedev’s first and only term, was so far the greatest challenge to his popularity. Even then, however, he was able to maintain a level of public approval above the 60 percent level. Four times over, he has been elected president already in the first round. As pointed out by Sharafutdinova (2020: ix): “Putin’s appeal to many Russians has been real, and the analysts need to take this reality seriously”. What accounts for his success? How long can his personal popularity withstand the wear and tear that a long incumbency and exposure to at least some policy failures would necessarily seem to entail? Are we, due to the year of 2020 that was so rife with formidable political challenges of different kinds, from the ravages of the covid-19 pandemic to the confrontations with the media power and charisma of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, finally reaching the limits beyond which Putin’s legitimacy can be stretched no longer?

The renowned independent Russian sociological institute Levada Center has carried out a series of monthly polls starting at the time when Putin first took office as prime minister in 1999. These polls are studied attentively by analysts all over the world, and the president’s approval rates seem to be as much of an obsession on the part of the Putin regime as it is among political observers abroad (Andrews-Lee and Liu 2020, Willerton 2017, Petrov et al 2014: 5). Similar surveys are conducted on a regular basis by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) and the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), both of which are more closely connected to state authorities. Despite this difference, the three polling institutes tend to come up with similar trends, not least since they often use the same methods and indeed fieldwork teams when making their surveys (Yudin 2020: 7).

According to the monthly figures, Putin’s approval ratings have by international comparison been uniquely high ever since Levada launched its series back in 1999. As of May 2021, they had since he first became president in 2000 never been below 59 percent, a low point which was reached in April and May 2020. Moreover, the approval rates had always superseded his disapproval ratings by a wide margin. There was a lengthy downturn in connection with the challenges against the Putin-Medvedev tandem in 2011-2012. Despite this severe stress test for the regime, Putin managed to reverse the development. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was widely popular and in its wake the president’s ratings turned steeply upwards again. For almost four years, they stabilized at or even reached above the 80 percent-limit, not sloping downwards until the summer of 2018 when an unpopular pension reform made the figures drop (Logvinenko 2020). The unruly year of 2020 saw both the devastation caused by the corona pandemic and the Russian constitutional reforms, which made it theoretically and legally possible for Putin to go on serving as president until the year of 2036. During 2020, the ratings swung back and forth in an indeterminate manner but sloped anew, approaching the levels of 2011 and 2012 from the late fall onwards.

1 The negative trend basically continued in early 2021, at the time when this book was finalized.

From January 2021 onwards, the Putin regime seemed to be slated for its gravest stress test since the legitimation crisis of 2011 and 2012. Putin was openly challenged by the opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, who was subjected to an assassination attempt orchestrated by the regime in August 2020 (Bellingcat 2020), survived it, was hospitalized in Germany, openly blamed Putin for being behind the murder plot, and then returned home to Russia in December 2020, only to be apprehended, incarcerated, and sentenced to a perennial prison stretch by the authorities. Through a widely influential film on Youtube about the incumbent president’s lavish holiday estate and about his alleged widespread and corrupted business activities, Navalny managed to put more than one chink in Putin’s armor. People all over the country turned out to demonstrate their support for Navalny and their discontent with a regime increasingly perceived to be ossified. The jury is still out at the time of writing, but there is reason to believe that this development might imply the onset of Putin’s deepest crisis of legitimacy so far.

The ratings problem

It is a main argument of this book that the legitimacy of the regime still largely hinges on Putin’s personal popularity and charisma. The default position of his incumbency creates a problem for future successors and renders it problematic for the regime to sustain itself, unless a cure is somehow found to restore the charisma that by many signs seems to be in the process of evaporating.

It has become a political priority for the Putin regime to follow approval rates attentively and keep them on a high level (Frye et al 2017). The significance that the Kremlin attributes to the study of the development of popular sentiments is underscored by the fact that substantial amounts of funding go into the regime’s own classified surveys administered by the FSO, the President’s Federal Protective Service (Pertsev and Solopov 2020). One, slightly anecdotal, piece of evidence of the ascribed importance was when the Russian Embassy in the United States called upon the Bloomberg news agency to apologize for misleading the US public by referring to VTsIOM poll data that indicated remarkably low levels of trust for President Putin (Tass 2020).2The logic was simple: since the data reflected badly on the president, they were bound to be wrong. Whereas the episode may seem amusing, it has serious general implications. Polls widely interpreted as truthful and representative have the potential to construct the reality that they represent (Yudin 2020). This fact goes a considerable way towards explaining the Russian regime’s interest in the polling industry. Ultimately it makes polling figures a matter of security concern for an increasingly authoritarian regime.

The regime’s preoccupation with approval rates is, however, not a unique thing for Russia; other world leaders share the intense desire to maintain ratings on a high level (Frye et al 2017). Such rates are, albeit rough, indices of legitimacy. High approval rates make matters easier for political leaders, regardless of whether they function in democratic or authoritarian contexts. Good showings facilitate the consolidation of power and implementation of policies that the leaders cherish (Andrews-Lee and Liu 2020). The ratings signal whether legitimacy is sustained or whether it needs mending. Trends revealed by the ratings indicate shifts in the societal relevance of the regime and speak to the sustainability of the social contract (Laruelle 2021: 85). It can thus be argued that the ratings are instrumental per se for the construction of legitimacy (Yudin 2020, Frye at al 2017, Rogov 2017). Solid figures may provide people with easily accessible arguments for why they should put faith in their leaders.

To what extent, then, can polling data be trusted when they emanate from authoritarian or hybrid (i.e., authoritarian with some democratic traits) settings? Would it not be easy for such states to cook the data and present fake figures as the truth of the matter? How do the authoritarian characteristics of the political system impact on the responses given in the polls (Yudin 2020, Wilson and Lee 2020, Rogov 2017)? Will respondents not refrain from giving answers from fear of repression, instead articulating the responses that the regime wishes to hear (Nathan 2020, Frye at al 2017)? Or, if the latter is not the case, is it not reasonable to assume that refusal rates will be higher among those invited respondents who have a critical or negative mindset in relation to the regime? This would make the proneness of regime sympathizers to participate in polls greater than that of critics, reinforcing a bias in poll results. It has also been pointed out that refusal rates for the Russian polling industry are very high, around 65-70 percent, and that one therefore should be very cautious in accepting the figures stated at face value (Yudin 2020, Rogov 2017).

These are all highly pertinent questions that need to be taken seriously. However, even if the Levada Center certainly works in an authoritarian or hybrid setting and has since 2016 been labelled “foreign agent” according to the infamous piece of Russian legislation which limits its range of activities (Flikke 2020: 163-165, Yudin 2020: 7)), its series of monthly polls about the president’s popularity is very valuable for researchers. The time series display the peaks and slumps of Putin’s popularity for every month during more than a 20-year period. It gives a solid foundation for conclusions about his public support during these vicissitudes. Even if, due to the high refusal rates, caution is recommended when it comes to the specific percentages of approval indicated, the trends and changes over time depicted by the series of monthly polls provide a valuable basis for analysis (Rogov 2017).

Throughout this book I maintain that Putin during his first twenty years in power has been largely successful at upholding the main pillars of his legitimacy. Like no other contemporaries, he has been able to get the message across to the electorate that he is the only one out there who is credible and trustworthy enough to hold chief executive power in Russia. The suggested narrative has been that no one else is simply up for the job. Also, Putin’s political communication skills have become increasingly honed over the years. Overall, he has managed to tell a convincing story, using a blend of great-power arrogance, pledges to order and stability, and personal charisma (Huskey 2013). According to some, the latter ingredient has above all been added during the third and fourth of his presidential tenures, during “high Putinism”. If this picture is now starting to crack, we may be entering a new era in Russian politics with highly unclear implications.

Putin has not created the powerful public discourses about the need for great power assertiveness, stability, and order. Rather, these discourses have created him. They have for a long time had a prominent position in Russian society. Even so, Putin has been markedly successful in making use of master discourses out there, appropriating them and bending them to fit his political purposes (Willerton 2017). His platform of political ideas, Putinism, was not created by him alone, but has emerged out of historical trends, cultural desires, and socially constructed myths (Langdon and Tismaneanu 2020). Again, as if by a sleight of hand, Putin has, for many voters, appeared as the originator and the driving force behind the creation of these societal beliefs. For more than a decade he has been outstandingly successful in this.

This is where we approach the real crux of the matter. The point that prompts careful consideration is that Putin’s long-time success may turn out to be a major liability for Russia since the legitimacy of the regime has been, and still is, so intimately tied to his person. What would happen if he were suddenly to pass away? Whoever tried to step in to take his place would encounter major problems of legitimacy, regardless of whether Putin’s old magic has started to recede or not. This is the nature of the Putin predicament, the very problem which prompted me to write this book. I shall strive to discuss it further in the following chapters.

Main material

Public addresses by prominent political leaders are always and everywhere indispensable sources for political analysis. Speeches by a political leader function much like the public performance of a national anthem: they become sites where national politics and ultimately states themselves are performed and constructed (Butler and Spivak 2007). However tactical they are at the time of their utterance, words expressed in public tend to live a life of their own. They are made note of, remembered, and kept in store, and in cases of grave inconsistency with other statements or actions, they come back to haunt the originator, with adverse effects on their credibility (Novitskaya 2017). This argument is relevant in most settings, also in non-democratic ones. Words matter. Phrases meant to calm, assuage, deter, or inspire people will be effective if their purposes are met, but may in the end be subversive if they fail to reach their goal.

The analytical focus of this book is on how the Russian regime—the “collective Putin” (Sharafutdinova 2020; Rutland 2017b)—legitimizes Putin’s presidential rule. The bulk of the empirical material for the study comes from the official website of the president of Russia, kremlin.ru. The website collects Putin’s official statements, such as major addresses, speeches on special occasions, press conferences and interviews.

For several years, there have been certain fixed nodes in the presidential calendar. These are annually recurring and major mediatized events, indeed rituals. The most important ones are the annual address (poslaniye) to the Federal Assembly, the speech to the Valdai Discussion Club, the televised Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, and the annual News Conference with major media (Fedotenkov 2020).

These events are important as political platforms from which the president’s statements are launched to make an impact. Of the four, the annual address to the Federal Assembly is the one most regulated by form and protocol, as it sets the main policy priorities and defines the most central agenda items for the coming year (Martus 2021, Ambrosio and Vandrovec 2013). The Valdai Discussion Club is a Kremlin-sponsored annual meeting of “experts on Russia in Russia” (Novitskaya 2017). These Davos-like annual meetings are a venue where Russian leaders meet high-level academics and political practitioners from home and abroad who share an interest in Russian political affairs. Putin has met with the participants of the Valdai Club every year since the meetings were initiated in 2004 (Valdai Discussion Club 2021). Current political priorities can be inferred from his addresses to the meeting, even if the format of the discussions is relatively free from protocol. The Direct Line and the News Conference are the media events that by appearance are less structured beforehand. These are occasions when the president meets the press and the public, ostensibly unplugged, to answer their questions on different matters. The shows try to signal spontaneity but there is little doubt that they are strictly regulated in terms of access to floor and microphone. Sometimes they are used to float issues that are introduced through more formal channels later.3

Not only do the four major mediatized events differ in terms of form and structure, but they are also different regarding the primary audience for which they are aimed. In the case of the poslaniya to the Federal Assembly, national and regional elites listen attentively, regardless of whether their professional affiliation is military, political, bureaucratic, business-oriented, or other. Since the political priorities for the coming year are outlined and presented, the attention of these elites will be guaranteed. Equally certain is that foreign audiences will tune in on these events as the announcement of priorities in foreign and security policies are an important part of the messages sent. Thus, these platform speeches are intended in equal measure for foreign audiences and for domestic ones. Regarding the Valdai Club, the domestic elite audiences are again likely to be targeted, not least to cover for the case that trial balloons are sent up or new political initiatives presented. The Direct Line and the News Conference are both events which are more attuned to the public. These are occasions where Putin takes the opportunity to shine and demonstrate his omniscient power and prowess, while using a language that is accessible for his average voters (Kukshinov 2021). He endeavors to speak directly to them.

The kremlin.ru website duly reports on all these major media events, even if the records are not always made verbatim and there are occasional differences of nuance between the spoken word and the written one (Gutterman 2021). The website devotes substantial space to the events, and they are widely noted by the public. Both Russian and English language versions of the documents on the website have been consulted as there sometimes are, again, significant differences of nuance between them. The English versions are frequently shortened and condensed. One kind of source quite often referred to in this monograph is interviews by foreign mass media which are reprinted on kremlin.ru. These texts, which have often proven to be relatively outspoken, should be assumed to be directed primarily to a foreign audience.

Supplementary material has been retrieved on a regular basis from the kremlin.ru website with the use of search terms such as “succession”, “constitution”, “legitimacy” or proper names of central importance. Aside from the official sources, existing data gathered by the Levada Center, have also been used, primarily in the shape of the monthly popularity ratings. Lastly, I have of course also had the benefit of consulting the works published by colleagues who have visited similar grounds, empirical or theoretical, before me.

Delimitations

Analyzing contemporary developments is always difficult and doing so regarding Russia in a time frame encompassing the eventful years of 2020 and parts of 2021 has been a particularly demanding task. The period has seen dramatic events: the plebiscite on the constitutional amendments enabling Vladimir Putin to serve for another two periods beyond 2024, the regime’s assassination attempt on Aleksey Navalny and his subsequent trial and imprisonment, country-wide demonstrations protesting his plight, and not least the devastating onslaught of the covid-19 pandemic. Big things unfold and they do so fast with significant and uncertain implications for the future. One has, on an everyday basis, the feeling of being witness to history in the making. Even so, when writing a monograph and having to meet an agreed schedule of publication, one must draw the line somewhere. There must be a cut-off point beyond which no new information is processed and included. For this book, I have set this point on May 31, 2021. Thus, I have not considered events after this date.

Transliteration of Russian words and names

For the references I have used the transliteration system elaborated by the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and the British Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN). I have also used this system in the body of the text, except for names where convention suggests another transliteration (e.g Yeltsin has been used instead of El’tsin, Navalny instead of Naval’nyy).

1 Data were missing for December 2020 so there was an unusual documentation gap between November 2020 and January 2021.

2 I thank Carolina Vendil Pallin for bringing this incident to my attention.

3 In the pandemic year of 2020, the Direct Line and the News Conference were merged into one single event, because the practices of social distancing did not allow the broadcasting of the Direct Line according to the usual format.

IITheoretical Points of Orientation

Political succession

As indicated by the introductory quote, the problem of succession of leaders has been a vital concern for political analysts at least since the times of Machiavelli. That famous early political theorist opined that succession by election was preferable to succession by ancestry, and that leaders had to prove themselves worthy of being chosen by election. In a healthy republic, the successor would be elected on the grounds of merit and reputation (Gagné 2011). Machiavelli was, however, not very explicit about the ways in which new leaders would have to prove themselves worthy. Assessed by today’s standards, many contemporary observers would consider his recommendations objectionable since he argued that strong leaders, or in his parlance, princes, were those who were prepared to wage war. If the princes were not ready to do this, their city would become “effeminate and the prey of its neighbors” (Machiavelli 1996: I, 19, 52).

Later analysts have continued to grapple with the question of succession and how new generations of leaders are expected to grow with their offices and assume pride of place. Once there, they are in most cases likely to be reluctant to yield the reins of power to someone else. This seems to be close to a natural law in politics, or to use the words of two prominent analysts:

Political succession, or rather its avoidance, is at the heart of the decisions leaders make. Except for the rare incumbent who voluntarily steps down, leaders overwhelmingly act as if they want to hold on to power as long as they possibly can (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2017: 708).

From this perspective, executive power is something comparable to “my precious” from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, enviously guarded by its temporary proprietor, always coveted by scheming potential competitors.

In democratic systems, the process of political succession is generally not that much of a problem, since constitutional frameworks and regular cycles of free and fair elections set limits to the rules of political leaders, regardless of whether they are committed and popular, or corrupted and generally estranged from their electorates. In the latter case, they will be more quickly voted out of office. As the saying goes, the rascals will be thrown out. In non-democratic settings, in authoritarian or hybrid systems like in Russia, things stand differently. Most often, there are constitutional frameworks in these systems too, but as practical experience has shown in Russia, constitutions may be altered or amended on the initiatives of the leader or their devout followers (Versteeg et al 2020, Baturo 2019, McKie 2019), and elections do not have the same decisive value and effect as they have in democratic political systems. However, without recourse to the regulating force of constitutional frameworks and regular, free and fair elections, processes of succession will still need to be dealt with somehow, some time, also in authoritarian and hybrid settings.