JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin’s Brittle Regime: Like the Soviet One That Preceded It, His System Is Always on the Brink of Collapse” – Foreign Affairs: Maksim Samorukov
“… [T]he Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary way … lack[ing] … basic quality controls. …. The costs of these structural deficiencies are mounting. … Putin’s regime, a highly personalized system run by an aging autocrat, is more brittle than it seems. Driven by Putin’s whims and delusions, Moscow is liable to commit self-defeating blunders. The Russian state effectively implements orders from the top, but it has no control over the quality of those orders. For that reason, it is at permanent risk of crumbling overnight, as its Soviet predecessor did three decades ago. … On the surface, Putin’s regime appears stable. The docility of the elite, the persistence of vast financial reserves and oil rents, and the state’s adeptness in shaping public opinion all make Putin seem invincible. But his system is ‘not collapsing’ in the same way that the late Soviet Union was ‘not collapsing.’
And as with the Soviet Union, the structure of Putin’s regime makes it far more fragile than it appears …. [and, as with certain crises of recent years,] unpredictability is likely to mark future crises of the Russian regime. Even a minor incident … could trigger a political avalanche if accelerated by the authorities’ inaction or policies based on Putin’s delusions. It is not the gravity of Russia’s problems but how the Kremlin deals with them …. A collapse may take years to materialize. Or it could happen in a matter of weeks. But the West should be aware that at any given moment the events in Russia may spiral out of the Kremlin’s control, triggering the swift demise of its seemingly imperishable regime.”