Happy Monday!
I hope life is treating you well. My schedule remains hugely disrupted — and will for the rest of the month. If I miss a week, forgive me. I’m here this week, however, and I wanted to offer a brief reflection on different scenarios for Russia’s future, amid speculation about internecine struggles within the regime. Specifically, I want to highlight some obvious gaps and a missing scenario from a recent article on the topic.
With that in mind, here’s what you can expect this week:
- Two scenarios for the future of Russia
- Two major issues with the two scenarios
- The missing third scenario
Two scenarios for the future of Russia
In a recent article, Vazhnyye istorii founder Roman Anin outlined two short-term scenarios for Russia’s future. These are worth citing in full:
- The Iranian path. Putin will succeed in consolidating loyal security services around himself — primarily the [Federal Guard Service] FSO and the National Guard — which will form a Russian analogue of Iran’s IRGC. Through unprecedented repression, which will affect broader segments of the population and those who were previously considered untouchable, the dictator will retain power by force. This scenario would also imply further isolation of the country from the internet and the outside world: the oprichnina will not tolerate any critics.
- The Time of Troubles. Historians do not like analogies, but history does not stop reproducing them. The first oprichnina emerged as an attempt by Ivan the Terrible to maintain control over the elites and strengthen autocratic rule in conditions of a prolonged and destructive war and internal crisis. The terror of the oprichnina, economic exhaustion, and devastation led to the Time of Troubles and a civil war.
Anin does not speculate which scenario he considers more likely. Instead, he argues that this does not particularly matter: “what matters is that each of them is highly likely”.
The basis or prompt for his claim is another article that his outlet published, which cites a report from an unspecified EU intelligence agency. According to this report, President Vladimir Putin fears an assassination attempt and there are growing tensions between factions of the security services. Anin characterised this as “one of the most important pieces of news about Russia in recent times” and a sign of “the transition of the Russian regime into a fundamentally different state”.
Two major issues with the two scenarios
Anin’s article is somewhat brief, meaning there’s not a lot to get one’s teeth into. But, as a thought experiment, these two scenarios are worth considering – especially as his is far from the only prominent media outlet to raise the spectre of internecine struggle. And it doesn’t take long before problems arise with each.
Let us take the “Iranian path” first. When the National Guard (Rosgvardia) was first created in 2016, it was characterised by some as “Putin’s praetorian guard”. The general perception was that it was designed as an internal security force, directly subordinate to the president, that could prevent any attempt to provoke a “coloured revolution” in Russia. It is perfectly plausible that Rosgvardia could form the basis for a reconstituted and loyal security apparatus. The FSO is much smaller, but given its role protecting the president, it would make sense for its members to be among those most trusted by him — and thus also be given a role.
The problem with this scenario, however, is what it fails to mention: The Federal Security Service (FSB). The FSB is Russia’s premier security institution, both de facto and de jure. While Rosgvardia has plenty of capacity to repress civilian opposition and protest, it is far from obvious that it would prevail in a straight-out institutional fight with the FSB. And a power struggle within the security services was the original premise for the article. It’s rather curious that the FSB doesn’t even warrant a mention.
What about the “Times of Troubles”? Here, we have a clear problem of delineation. The pathway is premised on the same “oprichnina” — the historical label Anin applies this reconstituted security apparatus — as the Iranian option. It therefore doesn’t represent a different path at all. Instead, both paths are Iranian — just in one the oprichnina are successful and in the other not. The second path consequently encounters the same problems as the first.
The missing third scenario
History offers us at least one other highly plausible scenario that warrants consideration: continuity. It may be true that there is growing conflict between different factions of the Russian security services, although one would like to see more than a second-hand discussion of a leaked intelligence report to take this as a given (when you’ve seen how these sausages are made, you know they vary hugely in quality!). It may also be true that the wider elite is growing dissatisfied with Putin and all that the war in Ukraine has brought — and thus willing to consider what a post-Putin Russia would look like (even if this is not the same as being willing to bring it about).
Yet there is no reason to presume that such internecine struggles will automatically prove fatal to the regime. First, a degree of conflict is integral to the system. When the Soviet Union collapsed, President Boris Yeltsin encouraged a proliferation of security agencies precisely so they could compete with and counterbalance one another. Although Putin has eroded this in part, allowing the FSB to regather many of the old powers of the old KGB, he certainly hasn’t eliminated institutional competition. Indeed, the creation of Rosgvardia introduced a new dimension to it. Second, these conflicts have spilled into the public domain before. To cite just one example, the late head of the Federal Drug Service, Viktor Cherkesov, was central to a very public discussion of the topic back in 2007, before being dismissed the following year for washing dirty linen in public.
Institutional competition may serve as an obstacle to the first path, while widespread awareness of its dangers among the parties could obstruct the second. But, more fundamentally, authoritarian regimes — in Russia and beyond — have a remarkable ability to muddle on despite contradictions, factionalism, and other struggles. Ironically, the Iranian regime — the demise of which has been predicted more than once — offers us a clear illustration of this.
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