Is Putin the Problem?

Anatol Lieven on the Russian elites who pushed for war

To Ukraine With Love' mural by artists Corie Mattie and Juliano Trindade (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

On March 3, in an on-air interview with Fox News, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. He reiterated that call in a tweet:

Lindsey Graham @LindseyGrahamSC

Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country - and the world - a great service.

Graham’s endorsement of murder was quickly and rightly condemned. At the very least, it’s impudent for a politician to advocate killing the leader of another nation, let alone one that has nuclear weapons. 

But while Graham’s reckless utterances are isolated incidents, his underlying logic is more widely shared. Assassination makes sense if you believe that Putin and Putin alone is the real cause of the war. I’ll confess that I’ve had similar thoughts in the run-up to the war and through the early days of conflict. In a podcast, David Klion and I talked about how a palace coup replacing Putin might be the easiest and best solution. 

My thinking on this went something like this: there’s little evidence of popular support for the war and even evidence of elite dissension against it. The major government-led attempt to mobilize pro-war opinion only started a week after the conflict started and was clearly a response to robust anti-war protests (which have seen more than 14,000 Russians arrested). Discomfort with the war could be seen in the criticisms made by children of the elite (Elizaveta Peskova, daughter of Putin’s press secretary, posted an anti-war message on Instagram, although it was quickly deleted) and objects raised by oligarchs like Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska (both of whom have distanced themselves from Putin). During the cusp of the invasion, Putin publicly dressed down his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, who expressed doubts about the wisdom of the aggressive policy Putin was following. 

Further evidence of the war’s unpopularity is Putin’s March 16 speech decrying “national traitors.” You don’t talk like that unless you feel you have significant opposition.

Michael Elgort 🤍❤️🤍🇺🇦✡️ @just_whatever

I have translated and added subtitles to the latest video speech by Vladimir Putin from two hours ago. Please don’t let it go in vain - I want everyone to see what a speech of true fascism looks like. No further comment needed, it’s all here, in his speech

This level of dissent from a military adventure is without precedent in Putin’s rule and suggests an autocrat who launched a war on  a whim, without having any real support. To be sure, by this analysis, it’s not at all clear that most of the Russian population is (or isn’t) anti-war. Rather, the general population and the elites alike are forced to accept Putin’s rule, or join a vocal minority of protestors who risk imprisonment, torture, and in some cases death for opposing Putin. Suffice to say, even if they’re relatively quiet, they might still be unhappy with what he’s done.

With this line of thinking, it becomes clear that Putin is the problem. Remove Putin and there is no problem. Conversely, if pressure is put on the Russian public and the Russian elite, they might try to overthrow Putin or least give him enough pushback to change policy. 

And yet.

My thinking here has shifted slightly after reading a persuasive essay in the Financial Times by Anatol Lieven, a well-connected British foreign policy analyst who is a fellow at the Quincy Institute. I still suspect Putin doesn’t have buy-in from the Russian population and there is significant elite dissent. But Putin doesn’t rule by whim alone. He has a constituency behind him.

Lieven makes a useful distinction between the notorious oligarchs—the ultra-rich who benefit from plundering Russia— and the siloviki—the “hard men” of the Russian military-industrial complex (some of whom are also very rich), who specifically profit from alignment with Russian nationalism. The true era of the oligarchs was the 1990s, when they set the terms for Boris Yeltsin’s government. Putin’s own base comes from nationalist military-industrial types who were disgusted by the oligarchs and wanted to see them sidelined. To be sure, the siloviki are corrupt as the oligarchs, but their corruption has an ideological purpose. 

According to Lieven: 

The siloviki have been accurately portrayed as deeply corrupt — but their corruption has special features. Patriotism is their ideology and the self-justification for their immense wealth.…

The siloviki are naturally attached to the idea of public order, an order that guarantees their own power and property, but which they also believe is essential to prevent Russia falling back into the chaos of the 1990s and the Russian revolution and civil war. The disaster of the 1990s, in their view, embraced not just a catastrophic decline of the state and economy but socially destructive moral anarchy — and their reaction has been not unlike that of conservative American society to the 1960s or conservative German society to the 1920s. In this, Putin and the siloviki have the sympathy of very large parts of the Russian population, who remain bitterly resentful — both at the way they were betrayed and plundered in the 1990s and what they perceive as the open contempt shown towards ordinary Russians by the liberal cultural elites of Moscow and St Petersburg. 

If Lieven’s analysis is correct, then getting rid of Putin won’t solve the underlying issues. It’s possible that Putin will be removed by a palace coup. It’s also possible he’ll negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine in the coming weeks. In that scenario, Putin could still lose power (a disappointing war might make some of the siloviki turn against him). 

But in either scenario, the removal of Putin won’t end Russia’s aggressive nationalism. The problem isn’t just Putin but the political cohort he belongs to. The siloviki isn’t going away easily. The only way it can be removed is by a democratic revolution. There are signs that such a revolution might happen (the anti-war protests are themselves a harbinger). But as yet that’s still more an aspiration than a reality. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

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