The Kremlin’s unprecedented reaction to Vladimir Putin’s falling ratings in the polls shows just how nervous he and those around him are. But he remains untouched because those who could overthrow him are so deeply a part of his system and are very much aware that they would be next if they got rid of him, political commentator Andrey Piontkovsky says.
In an authoritarian system like Mr. Putin’s, the Russian opposition commentator says, the overwhelming majority of Russians who don’t like Mr. Putin are not in a position to force him out. They lack the organizational structures and leaders needed to achieve that (censoru.net/2020/05/30/putina-mogut-objavit-mertvym-ukraina-v-opasnosti-intervju-s-rossijskim-oppozicionerom-piontkovskim.html).
And the pandemic that has driven down the Russian president’s ratings to under 20 percent, Mr. Piontkovsky continues, has paradoxically reduced their possibilities still further by putting in place “a large number of restrictions and monitoring that will remain after the coronavirus ends” because such arrangements protect the Kremlin leader.
The only people who could conceivably get rid of Mr. Putin are the members of his immediate entourage. They have no illusions about Mr. Putin and his standing, but they know something that keeps them from acting: They aren’t outstanding personalities in their own right but creatures of the Putin system; and if he goes, they will soon follow.
Such people, Mr. Piontkovsky says, are now caught between two fears: “staying with Putin is horrible because everything is falling apart and he cannot defend them from the anger of the population,” but “removing him is terrible because this would mean wiping out all of the last 20 years and by discrediting him they would discredit themselves.”
Thus, they suffer from “a serious cognitive dissonance,” Mr. Piontkovsky continues, a mental state that leads them to demand apologies from foreign media outlets that report Mr. Putin’s declining standing with the people and to think about ways that Mr. Putin could be removed or at least sidelined in ways not damaging to themselves.
“The simplest method” to get rid of Mr. Putin, of course, is to declare that “he has died from a heart attack or the coronavirus.” But that is also the most dangerous, because either the members of his entourage would have to stay the course or face the prospect of a serious struggle within the elite with unpredictable consequences.
Given that calculus, the Russian analyst says, many of them appear to be thinking about creating a state council in which Mr. Putin would formally remain but be stripped of any real power – an arrangement that would allow them to go on with the thievery in which he has helped them engage for years but without the popular anger he has sparked.
For such people, that arrangement would be ideal. In their minds, Mr. Putin has always been “a PR instrument created in 1999 in a television test tube,” a phenomenon to serve as a kind of bridge between their kleptocracy and the people, someone who could be presented as “a simple man from the people who will ingather the Russian lands.”
But now, Mr. Putin has proved “inadequate” as such a front man, and they are worried. None of their choices is good, but they are clearly considering which may be the worst and which the less bad as the Kremlin leader’s standing with the Russian people continues to sink, Mr. Piontkovsky concludes.
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).