This piece about Putin is worth reading. Ben Judah writes about the single most important thing most Russia observers missed about Vladimir Putin going into this crisis:
Among even the leaders who had spent weeks warning a major offensive was imminent, a tone of surprise was not too hard to detect in their statements. “I cannot believe this is being done in your name,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, trying to address, for a moment, the Russian people, “or that you really want the pariah status it will bring to the Putin regime.”
However, that phrase—“the Putin regime”—which has been stuck to all discussions of Russian politics now for almost 20 years, in some ways itself helps explain why so many people who believed they understood the country turned out to be so wrong about the Ukraine conflict. It has become clear that what exists inside the Kremlin is no longer a “regime” at all—a system of government where multiple figures can affect and feed into decision-making, from security chiefs to billionaires—as many believed.
Instead, it has transformed into what political scientists call a personalist dictatorship, where the whims of one man, and one man only, determine policy, a fact that has terrifying implications for Russia and the world.
Americans tend to see the world in much the same way as President Joe Biden frames it in his speeches, divided neatly between “democracies” and “autocracies.” But the reality is that authoritarian states exist on a political spectrum depending on how much power is exercised by a single individual—and where states land on this spectrum has a big impact on matters of war and peace. At one end, you have civilian-run regimes, like Hu Jintao’s China or Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where political power is checked and shared within a ruling party. At the other, you have personalist dictatorships like that of, say, Saddam Hussein, where rivals are purged, loyalists are rewarded, cults of personality flourish, and all authority runs through the glorious leader.
The political science literature suggests that personalist dictatorships are more erratic and dangerous to the outside world than other sorts of autocracies.
Researchers have found they are more likely to start wars, for instance (institutionalized civilian-run regimes are about as apt to use force as democracies), and also tend to perform worse militarily (not surprising, since their leaders are often surrounded by yes men). But while civilian-run regimes might be less apt to launch destructive, harebrained conflicts in the short term, in the long term they can still be ticking time bombs.
That’s because as they age, their intricate power structures often devolve and allow dictators to consolidate personal control. In a forthcoming paper, Andrew Leber and Matthew Reichert of Harvard University and Christopher Carothers of the University of Pennsylvania theorize that this tends to happen when there’s no influential old guard of political elites who can stop them. All of which pretty much sums up what has happened in Russia over the last two decades.
If you are interested, he goes on to lay out the long road Putin took to get where he is. We watched it with our own eyes but didn’t see it.
And I don’t think I have to mention which form a certain orange monster would take if he had the chance.