The sordid act of air piracy and state terrorism by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko was actually another milestone in Moscow’s slide toward the pariah state status. The collective farm chairman-turned butcher Lukashenko wouldn’t have dared to stage such a stint if he hadn’t felt the full backing of the Kremlin.
After the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union gradually and slowly began the process of returning to respectability. It proceeded by fits and starts and there were many more outrages both at home and abroad than signs of progress. Still, even the KGB mostly covered its activities behind the veneer of legality. It still resorted to international terrorism and terror at home but its party handlers usually insisted on deniability.
Mikheil Gorbachev’s glasnost was a deliberate shift away from communist amorality and after the fall of communism, Russia declared its intention to rejoin the community of nations. Under Vladimir Putin, however, Russia has been sliding back to a hybrid version of Bolshevism and the Golden Horde under Batu Khan. What Lukashenko brazenly did in Minsk will undoubtedly be repeated in Moscow, just as the domestic terror which he has unleashed in Belarus is a miniature model of what awaits ordinary Russians in the very near future.
In 1969, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote an essay titled “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” It was a scholarly analysis of hidden strains within Soviet society, but by choosing 1984 as the date the author also posed a rhetorical question: will the Soviet Union eventually develop into George Orwell’s dystopia.
Amalrik was right in the sense that the USSR didn’t survive long after 1984. On the other hand, the system never developed the total control envisioned by Orwell.
The choice of 2037 is similarly two-fold. Just as Amalrik gave the Soviet Union a 15-year deadline, so it is reasonable to ask whether the Russian Federation will endure for the next decade and a half. And it is equally reasonable to wonder whether Russia will sink into bloody state terror of Stalin’s 1937.
Russia’s power structure is an opaque Byzantine enigma, outsiders have no idea what is brewing behind the Kremlin walls and any scenario is possible. Putin can be removed at any moment. He may be replaced by a more determined dictator who would try to mobilize the country — the way Andropov briefly did in 1982. The country may fall into anarchy with various factions fighting an omnia-contra-omnes mafia turf war. A well-meaning reformer in the Gorbachev mold may come to power, as well, in which case the federation will dissolve peacefully on the model of the Soviet Union as soon as more power is devolved to the local authorities.
Incidentally, Vladimir Sorokin’s new novel describes the latter model in which Russia is broken up into units such as the Altai Republic, the Urals Republic, the Far East Republic and a variety of other homelands, including savage Moskovia.
Nevertheless, the most probable scenario is still that in 2037 Putin, by then aged 85, will remain ensconced in the Kremlin. He will have won the 2024 election and finished in 2036 the two six-year presidential terms he has already secured for himself. There is no doubt that he intends to be president for life.
Putin’s selling point for his 20-year-old stay in power has been stability. Russians were sick of the unpredictability of Gorbachev’s perestroika and the ensuing “lawless 1990s” and continue to yearn for a steady hand on the tiller which Putin supposedly provides. However, it is not stability; but rigidity, and as such, it is the system’s weakness. Just like the Soviet system it has become incapable of change. The longer Putin holds on to power, the more its problems will fester. By 2037 it will certainly be ready to burst at the seams.
Putin may be a good tactician but he is no strategist. He never outgrew his Leningrad childhood when he was a “difficult child,” a mean street hooligan. A hooligan would typically vandalize a pay phone booth on the corner and steal the receiver, but then he wouldn’t know what to do with it and would just dump it after a while.
Putin never had any long-term plan for his presidency or for Russia. You can see that all his decisions are opportunistic and spur-of-the-moment, driven by his deep-seated resentments and thin skin. The Russian military probably had worked out a plan to occupy Crimea in an emergency — Russia had its major navy base there — but the decision to annex the peninsula was driven by the EuroMaidan Revolution and the expressed wish of the Ukrainian people to spurn Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union in favor of the European Union. While the military aspects of the operation had been prepared, nothing else had been thought through — so that even now, seven years later, Crimea remains an economic and political burden.
The same lack of planning characterized Putin’s foray into eastern Ukraine. Having declared the existence of Novorossiya, Putin had neither a military force nor a network of agents to foment serious trouble.
There are other examples of Putin’s pointless “victories,” such as intervention in Syria and the election of Donald Trump, neither of which brought him any lasting dividends and looks more like acts of senseless international hooliganism rather than wise strategic decisions advancing Russia’s national interests.
It is equally unlikely that Putin had a plan to unleash bloody terror in Russia. All he ever wanted to do is to enjoy a life of luxury, to keep himself young and in shape, swim, play hockey and have affairs with young women, and to do so as long as possible. In fact, he initially thought that he could achieve these goals more successfully by staying on good terms with Washington and the West. He started his rule by hinting at closer relations with NATO and the EU. He was the first to express support to George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.
However, the only way he could stay in power in Russia was by building a national kleptocracy. This required suppressing dissent and strangling the nascent civil society in Russia. But once he chose that path the system which had been originally built by Stalin and which had laid dormant under the apparent humanization of Russian society, began to snap into action. It has logic and dynamics all its own, which is to get more and more immoral, cruel, and unreasonable as it strangles active opposition and terrorizes the population.
We see clearly as Russia is shedding the remnant of decency and morality, inevitably sliding into indiscriminate repression. Eventually, the system will start eating its own, devouring loyal Putinists and supporters of the regime, the same way Stalin’s repressive system did a century before, in 1937.
