Сколько ОСТАЛОСЬ ПУТИНУ у ВЛАСТИ? - Екатерина Шульман

Summary

Ekaterina Shulman argues that ending the war would not necessarily threaten the regime. There is no automatic link between peace and reduced military spending: rebuilding and expanding military capacity could keep spending high. Lower payments to soldiers and bereaved families might ease federal and regional budgets, but she doubts this would destabilize the government. She also rejects the idea that returning veterans are likely to organize a revolution, and says propaganda could present an eventual end to the war as a victory.

Shulman describes personalist autocracy as a basic, self-reinforcing form of rule: power and resources are concentrated around one leader, institutions are weakened, and resource-export income can help sustain the system. Such a model can be easier to maintain during a ruler’s lifetime than to pass on to a successor. By contrast, democracy depends on institutions and on leaders accepting that they can lose power—something she calls remarkable and difficult to achieve.

She sees little reason to expect a large cohort of young people to drive political change, pointing to Russia’s aging population and high male mortality. More consequential, in her view, is the growing concentration of power in the security services, at the expense of other parts of the system.

She offers as a hypothesis that an authoritarian system can become so centered on its security apparatus that little remains beyond it, drawing a comparison with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. But security agencies may be better at coercion than at governing. Shulman invokes the repeated reorganization of Soviet security bodies, including the division of Beria’s powerful ministry, as an example of how political leadership sought to keep them under control. Her closing question is whether a security apparatus with mainly coercive tools can effectively govern a country without meaningful oversight.

Presenter/Contributor

Ekaterina Shulman