Comment: Russian elites’ dissatisfaction key to Putin’s future

By Samuel A. Greene / Special To The Washington Post

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds into its third week — with mounting civilian casualties, more than 2 million refugees fleeing and untold numbers of internally displaced people still in the country — there is a growing realization among Western policymakers that the quickest way to end this war is for President Vladimir Putin to leave office, and most likely not of his own volition.

While no Western government is openly pursuing a policy of regime change, all of them hope that sanctions will encourage Russians of all stripes to show Putin the door. Which invites the question: Is Putin coup-proof? Because if there were ever a set of circumstances that might induce a change of power in Moscow, we are seeing them now.

The reasons Putin went to war remain inscrutable. Whatever else it might achieve, this war will make Russia poorer and less secure, bring NATO closer to its borders — rather than pushing it away — and strengthen the resolve of governments throughout Moscow’s former empire to seek protection from rival powers, be they the United States, the European Union or China. But it is also radically reshaping the structure of power in Russia itself, in ways that could consolidate Putin’s authority for years to come, or possibly bring his rule crashing down.

Initiating this war, in short, seems to be part of a continuing effort on Putin’s part to reshape the structure of Russian politics, moving from a situation in which he serves the titans of Russian business, politics and bureaucracy to one in which those elites serve him. If he’s successful, instead of a large and fractious class of rich and powerful Russians who maintain at least some ties with Europe and the United States, Western leaders will be left to deal with Putin and his security men; a group over whom Washington, London and Brussels have considerably less leverage. This will be an unfettered and even more unpredictable Russia, and very likely a much more tyrannical one, as the state claims more and more control over the economy.

Putin has long chafed at being beholden to his country’s elites. When he first came to power in 2000, his ability to rule, like Boris Yeltsin’s before him, was severely limited. He had to deal with media moguls and oligarchs, politicians and officeholders; people who were not only self-interested but powerful enough to try to impose their own agendas on the Kremlin. To remedy that situation, Putin offered the Russian elite a bargain: They could be fabulously wealthy and entirely unaccountable to the public if they agreed not to use their leverage to prevent Putin from doing as he saw fit.

This bargain has held for nearly 20 years. Anyone who challenged it — such as the media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, the oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov — quickly found themselves either in jail or in exile. Others got access to federal, regional and municipal budgets, and to the resources of state-run corporations, from Gazprom to the railways to the mortgage agency, all of which were encouraged to direct funds in politically convenient directions.

While the elite never really owned the assets that generated their enormous wealth in Russia, they were allowed to park the proceeds overseas, where they could invest them, borrow against them and live in luxury. Meanwhile, Putin’s role was to keep the money flowing, to manage conflicts between competing interests and to be the public face of a system that did not have the public interest at heart.

This arrangement served both sides well; until it didn’t. In fact, for the past decade or so it has been hard to find anyone among the Russian elite who is particularly satisfied. As Russia’s economy began to sputter in 2014, Putin found that there was no longer enough money in the system to keep his elite happy, and he began to prioritize those on whom his continued rule truly relied: the security services, and the oilmen, first and foremost. Everyone else was invited to be content with reduced status.

People grumbled, but no one challenged Putin. Political change would have created winners and losers, with considerable uncertainty about who would come out on top. Putin himself helped reinforced that sense of risk, dividing economic and political interests against one another, and making it difficult for coalitions to form. In response, the elite stashed increasing amounts of their wealth outside Russia, insulating themselves against the Kremlin’s predations and resisting Putin’s continued calls to repatriate their cash.

That era is now over. Putin’s war — and the sanctions the West has imposed — deprive Putin’s economic and political clients of their key source of semi-autonomy: access to the West as a safe place to protect their money, their families and their freedom. What happens next will decide the future of Russia.

If Putin — with help from Western sanctions — succeeds in depriving the men currently running the country’s biggest industries, bureaucracies and regions from access to the West, and subjugates their interests to those of the security services, they would be transformed into expendable salarymen and managers. No longer the protected constituents of a powerful political system, this class would lose the power to control its own future. If the sense of loss is sufficiently widespread, we should expect a response. No longer paralyzed by the fear of change, Russian elites could begin to see that without change, they will all lose out. Where he once guaranteed their prosperity, Putin would now be guaranteeing only their penury.

Putin clearly sees this threat. Ministers, high-level functionaries and the heads of major corporations are reportedly under orders not to resign, on pain of arrest. Even Elvira Nabiullina, the usually apolitical and technocratic central bank chief, was forced to make a public statement calling on her staff — and the economic elite at large — to “stop bickering about politics” and get back to work. But Putin’s problem is that this war upends the divide-and-rule strategy that had served him so well. It makes a loser out of each and every member of the Russian elite.

A coup in which elites back a new Russian leader would seek to restore the system that class enjoyed before Putin set out on the path to war. Returning Crimea to Ukraine would be out of the question, but Putin’s replacement, whoever that might be, would have a clear mandate to take whatever steps lead to the end of sanctions, restore economic ties with the West and use the state’s considerable control over the media and political system to explain to Russian citizens just how badly they’ve been led astray. Western observers should take care, however, not to confuse such a coup with a democratic revolution. It would continue, almost inevitably, to be a corrupt and unaccountable system, contemptuous of the Russian public and wedded to kleptocracy; but not to war.

Samuel A. Greene is a professor of Russian politics and director of the Russia Institute at King’s College, London. He is co-author of “Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia.”