What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient?
The recent mutiny in Russia revealed cracks in President Vladimir Putin’s regime and raised hopes in the West that his days in power were numbered. There are two reasons for caution: Autocrats have remarkable staying power and only rarely are replaced by a democratic government. Images of hundreds of heavily armed men rumbling in a convoy toward Moscow raised the possibility that the man who launched the Ukraine war and has dominated Russian politics for more than two decades could lose power.
It punctured Putin’s aura of invincibility and inevitability. A week later, however, Putin is still in charge and his would-be rival, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is in exile. “We shouldn’t be surprised," U.K.
Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last week. “The Russian state has been designed over 300 to 400 years to protect the czar." In the 1980s and 1990s, military dictatorships in South America gave way to democracy, Communist regimes fell and protest movements chased out dictators such as the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos. More authoritarian governments fell in the Arab Spring and the so-called color revolutions in former Soviet republics.
But autocrats are proving more resilient these days. A regime survival playbook of sorts has emerged, with states combining lethal force and widespread arrests to halt protests, targeting opposition leaders with selective killing, jailing and exile, and allowing disaffected populations to leave. Regimes from Belarus to China to Venezuela have also been cooperating more closely to withstand diplomatic pressure from the West, get around economic sanctions and employ increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies to keep track of dissidents.
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