Putin’s Crisis of Authoritarianism From WSJ

Russia’s debacle in Ukraine shows democracy isn’t the model that’s failing.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2022 

It might seem surprising that Ukrainians have fought so well, but it wasn’t surprising they would fight, given their knowledge of what living under Vladimir Putin’s regime really is like. Nor that the Russian army would underperform: Mr. Putin’s mooning of late about the religiously transcendent purpose of the Russian state always sits oddly in a regime that exists to loot the state, as any conscript can see.

Even those Russians who support the war know the truth about their leaders: They are thieves.

A much simpler explanation exists of Mr. Putin’s evolution over 22 years than many accounts you’ve been reading, which emphasize ideology, frustration with the West, even a degree of mysticism. Go back and it’s clear his early liberal sentiments evaporated when he realized his presidency would have to become permanent so he could avoid accountability for the crimes that his rise occasioned.

Mr. Putin is known to be a fan of the “Godfather” films but a Guy Ritchie movie strikes me as a better metaphor for his regime—you know, in which fast-talking London gang bosses comment colorfully on the inanities and stupidities of their fellow gangsters. On Tuesday, Russia continued its pell-mell retreat from Mr. Putin’s original, colossally misinformed war aims in Ukraine, which have produced only disaster. As Ray Winstone might say, what a prat.

If the Russian leader were as unchallengeable at home as many believe, why does he seem to organize his life around the principle that, to almost everyone around him, he’s expendable? His elaborate coup-proofing suggests he knows not everyone is in awe of his abilities or his public support. Mr. Putin is no Hitler or Mussolini, never having created a mass political movement or undying cadre of loyalists. If Mr. Putin were dethroned tomorrow, most Russians would view the matter with the same stoic passivity they do the weather.

It follows that his decision-making may also involve more uncertainty about what his colleagues will tolerate than we appreciate in the West.

Case in point: He may have rented the loyalty of Russia’s general staff by showering them with hundreds of billions in the past decade, much of which went to mansions and overseas accounts. But he still had to proceed with his Ukraine adventure on the basis that it would be a cakewalk, over in three days, a costless victory, producing only impotent tut-tutting from the West.

If he had offered his generals only sweat, tears, blood and sacrifice, they likely would have coughed into their sleeves and quickly left the room to adjust their portfolios in light of the discovery that Mr. Putin had lost the plot.

Or take his evident terror of personal contact and his legendary distrust of wireless communications. Both likely contribute to his propensity for misinformation and miscalculation. These facts may also mean—snip, snip—his authority is vulnerable to something as simple as cutting his landlines. The Kremlin’s frantic Ukraine backpedaling of recent days shows why Joe Biden’s ad lib in Poland may have been a gaffe, but it was an inspired gaffe. And the walkback was inspired too—leaving Mr. Putin’s associates in certainty about nothing except the fact that he can never again serve as a useful interlocutor to the world’s indispensable superpower.

My one disappointment was that China didn’t pipe up to say, “No, Mr. Putin must remain in power,” to emphasize just how thoroughly the Russian leader, through his own blunders, has reduced himself to a rag doll being fought over by nations that actually matter.

There’s a lesson about the relative blunders of free and unfree societies. The West’s managerial and democratic elite, of which Mr. Biden is a peerless example, may be feckless and short-sighted, and yet their societies go from strength to strength and don’t commit colossal errors (e.g., famines that kill tens of millions). We may one day conclude as much even about the relative merits of the U.S. and Chinese approaches to the Covid pandemic.

Recall that the U.S. also pursued wars that came to be seen as failures. But here’s the point: They were affordable failures. Indeed, our wars could drag on inconclusively because they were so far below the threshold of what the U.S. could sustain economically and politically.

The Chinese are assumed to be carefully husbanding the lessons of Mr. Putin’s Ukraine debacle as they get ready to anoint Xi Jinping with president-for-life status, but they are missing the most important lesson. Western societies insist on changing their leaders every few years, and it makes them strong and resilient in a way no authoritarian society is. This points to the true unpatriotism of a Putin or a Xi. Their central job, as they see it, is to deny their societies the blessing of regular, orderly and lawful succession of power from one set of hands to another.