After Putin [:] Russia’s president could lose power in any number of ways. What will the end of his rule mean for his own country, Ukraine and the world?
The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 4, 2022 11:41 am ET
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- LEONID VOLKOV: Turmoil—and a Democratic Spring
- JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER: No Peace With Ukraine
- GARRY KASPAROV: The Free World Must Act
LEONID VOLKOV: Turmoil—and a Democratic Spring
When Vladimir Putin is gone—whether there is a palace coup, he dies from natural causes, or aliens take him away to Mars—there will be no new Putin. How can I be sure this isn’t wishful thinking? Because we—the team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the group founded by jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny—have studied Putinism for over a decade, and we know everything about it.
Mr. Putin’s Russia is a mafia state. This isn’t an insult but a scientific definition. There is Mr. Putin, and there are about 20 key lieutenants, each of them responsible for some particular area. They all hate each other and compete against each other, and no one is allowed to become more than a 10% shareholder of Russia’s power structure. If one of them tries to consolidate power or influence in their hands, others immediately start fighting against them. This isn’t a bug of the system but an essential feature. It is how Mr. Putin designed it 20 years ago and has carefully implemented it.
One thing that is not compatible with this masterpiece of authoritarianism is the inheritance of leadership. When Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, he was probably too young to think about who would take his place. Now it is too late: The moment he appoints a successor, he becomes a lame duck. Everyone will discuss their future with the successor, not with Mr. Putin—and the successor will use the first available opportunity to get rid of Mr. Putin’s overseeing eye.
When Mr. Putin is gone, a new Putin will not emerge. Rather, there will be a fight among wannabe Putins. His potential successors will build all sorts of coalitions—the smartest of them will reach out to get support in the West—and this competition will create enormous political turbulence in Russia.
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All of this has happened before in our country. If you ask anyone in the West one simple question about Russian history—who came after Stalin?—you will probably get a wrong answer: Nikita Khrushchev. Wrong! Stalin died in March 1953, and Khrushchev managed to consolidate power in his own hands only by 1958, after five years of intense political turmoil. Those five years go by the nickname ottepel (thaw), a period of enormous liberalization of political life in the Soviet state, caused by the fact that power in the Kremlin was split and insecure.
The same will happen after Mr. Putin’s death. With a difference, though: Unlike in 1953, there is now a civil society in Russia, hundreds of thousands of (mostly) young people who have experience in local activism, grass roots projects and political campaigns. For them—for us—this turmoil will be a great window of opportunity, and we will do our best to take advantage of it. There will be a new thaw, and spring will come.
Mr. Volkov is the chairman of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and chief of staff for Alexei Navalny.
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER: No Peace With Ukraine
Many in the West believe that the best hope for ending the Ukraine war is to remove Vladimir Putin from power. Although predicting how wars will play out is difficult, his exit wouldn’t increase the prospects for a settlement very much, if at all. His replacement is likely to be at least as hostile toward Ukraine and the West.
There is virtual agreement among Russia’s foreign policy elites that the American-led policy of making Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border and eventually bringing it into NATO would directly threaten its security. That consensus hasn’t budged since 2008, when William Burns, the present CIA director, who was then the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, reported that, “In more than 2½ years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Nevertheless, Ukraine today sees itself as so closely linked to NATO that both President Volodymyr Zelensky and his defense minister describe it as a “de facto” member. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Putin is deeply committed to fighting a long war to sever that bond and turn Ukraine into either a neutral buffer state or a dysfunctional rump state that is of little value to the West. It is hard to imagine any Russian leader accepting a vibrant Ukraine that is either formally or informally a part of NATO.
It is possible that Mr. Putin’s goals in Ukraine are unrealistic and that Russia will lose the war. The combination of battlefield losses and Western sanctions could even drive it from the ranks of the great powers. If Mr. Putin refused to accept that outcome, one might think a new Russian leader would face reality and accept defeat. But that result is unlikely: Great powers in desperate straits usually escalate rather than submit, as Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor shows. If pushed to the wall, Moscow would at least consider using its nuclear arsenal to salvage the situation. After all, that was NATO’s policy during the Cold War in the event that the Warsaw Pact’s conventional forces were defeating NATO’s armies and threatening to overrun Western Europe.
As for possible successors, Mr. Putin faces hardly any public protests that he cannot handle, and there is no galvanizing opposition leader. Any serious challenger is likely to emerge from the leadership circle around him, which is filled with hawks who are all deeply invested in the Ukraine war, like Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the National Security Council, and Dmitry Medvedev, who replaced Mr. Putin as president from 2008 to 2012.
Those hoping for an end to the fighting in Ukraine should not see Mr. Putin’s removal as a promising path to peace.
Mr. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author, most recently, of “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities.”
GARRY KASPAROV: The Free World Must Act
Some political slogans are unique to authoritarian regimes. Back in 2011, one of our most popular chants in the Russian opposition seemed banal to observers from the free world. “Russia without Putin!” we shouted, at the last massive rallies of the pro-democracy movement I helped to form when I retired from professional chess in 2005.
It wasn’t just a demand. It was a challenge to Russians and the world to visualize a free and prosperous future, a Russia welcomed in the community of civilized nations. It was a challenge we failed to meet.
Those impressive demonstrations were the last days of what I call the vegetarian era of Mr. Putin’s demolition of Russian civil society. Soon it would be time for the red meat of nationalism and for blood in the streets of Moscow.
I now live in New York City. Other opposition leaders have been silenced. Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in front of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny is in a maximum-security prison after surviving a murder attempt by poisoning. Russia is an authoritarian police state, invading its neighbors, committing atrocities and threatening nuclear annihilation. This is Russia with Mr. Putin.
Mr. Putin is facing grave challenges to his grip on power due to his unprovoked war on Ukraine. Eight years after Russia first invaded, the free world has finally applied serious financial and political pressure on Mr. Putin and his cronies and also sanctions that reach the urban centers he has tried to shield from the worst effects of his policies and adventures.
Russia was never obliged to account for the horrors of the Communist era. That mistake should not be repeated.
Many prognosticators prefer to skip over the immediate aftermath of Mr. Putin’s inevitable fall, as if a fairly elected government will magically arise from the fall of a KGB mafia. Russians have few ways to prepare for the glorious day of Mr. Putin’s exit, but the rest of the world must lay the ground and prepare to act boldly to support the creation of a Russian state that is functional in the near term and that will eventually come to represent all of its people.
The many concessions made to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union led directly to Mr. Putin’s rise after the chaotic, corrupt—but free—interregnum of Boris Yeltsin. But Russia was never obliged to account for the horrors of the Communist era. That mistake should not be repeated.
Mr. Putin’s fall will take place amid the military and economic disasters he created and, regardless of who claims the Kremlin, the free world will have considerable leverage over their survival. Even a nationalist junta, unless it wishes to follow quickly in Putin’s footsteps, will need to reach accords to get the lights back on. These agreements cannot be limited to rhetoric about free elections. They must include reparations to Ukraine and war crimes trials. They must outline plans for a new constitution, with a parliamentary system, and for the independence of Russian regions long exploited by Moscow’s imperial grasp.
Russia after Mr. Putin is as difficult to picture as he intended. Every dictator must appear irreplaceable, to be the lesser evil, the devil we know. But Mr. Putin’s end will come, as much a surprise to him as to anyone else. Let us learn from the past and be ready.
Mr. Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
ANGELA STENT: A Diminished Power Facing the Unexpected
What comes after Vladimir Putin will depend on how the Russia-Ukraine war ends. Prior to Russia’s invasion, Mr. Putin had succeeded in restoring Russia as a great power, returning to parts of the world from which it had withdrawn after the Soviet collapse. It was a significant player in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Latin America, even as its ties with the West deteriorated after its 2014 annexation of Crimea and war by proxy in the Donbas. Russia was an energy superpower integrated into the global economy.
After the war, Russia will be a diminished power. Its army’s performance has caused its partners to reassess their view of Russia’s capabilities and the judgment of its leader. Having lost Europe as a market and access to Western technology and investment, Russia will no longer be an energy superpower, and its economy is deglobalizing and demodernizing as a result of Western sanctions. It will instead integrate more deeply with China. This will be Mr. Putin’s legacy.
A more pragmatic successor might welcome back tech-savvy émigrés and understand that a less repressive system would enhance Russia’s economic performance.
Mr. Putin’s legacy will also be the creation of a highly personalized political system run by the security services, where institutions are largely irrelevant to decision-making. As far as we know, Mr. Putin is the chief decider, and it is unclear who is willing to contradict him. A major question is whether his successor would have the same clout to dictate what happens.
Given these uncertainties, several outcomes are possible. In the first, Russia emerges from the war with more Ukrainian territory, and Mr. Putin will claim this as a victory. He could then remain in office for some time and would likely be followed by someone with similar views. His successor would continue his antagonistic policy toward the West and might continue Mr. Putin’s effort to create a Slavic state of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and possibly northern Kazakhstan. Domestic repression would continue, and few of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who have left because they oppose the war would return.
But it is also possible that, after a prolonged period of economic crisis, a more pragmatic, modernizing group could take over. They would prize economic growth and greater integration with the global economy and would see the need for less antagonistic relations with the West and jettisoning the imperial agenda of their predecessor. They might welcome back some of the tech-savvy émigrés and understand that a less repressive system would enhance Russia’s economic performance.
However, if Russia were to lose the war and Mr. Putin were to leave suddenly, there could be a succession struggle. Russia could enter a period of prolonged instability. Centrifugal forces might seek greater autonomy for the non-Russian regions and, if those groups were armed, civil war could break out.
With Russia, it is prudent to expect the unexpected. After all, Mr. Putin expected a five-day victory, not an eight-month war.
Ms. Stent is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.”
MICHAEL KIMMAGE: Shakespearean Tragedy in the Making
Russian politics is a Shakespeare play. But which one is it? Will some Brutus plunge in the dagger, provoking unrest without end? Is Vladimir Putin Lear-like and out of touch, destined for madness? Or does he more resemble Richard III, distorted in vision and evil at heart, living and then dying by the sword? Russian politics evokes Shakespeare because so much depends on one man—and because, like Shakespeare’s history plays, it is moving inexorably toward tragedy.
One possibility is that the status quo in Russia will replicate itself post-Mr. Putin. Together with the military, the security services would sustain the monopoly on violence required for a functioning state. They would have no sentimental attachment to Mr. Putin’s legacy: They could mount a revolution of pragmatism and accept a pullback from the war in Ukraine, adopting a siege mentality in foreign policy instead. But they would likely continue to pursue Mr. Putin’s war against the West, if by other means, and use repression at home to secure their rule. What might follow Mr. Putin, in this case, is a long array of Putinist administrators.
Is Vladimir Putin Lear-like and out of touch, destined for madness? Or will he be more like Richard III, living and then dying by the sword?
The other route to tragedy is more properly Shakespearean. Shakespeare discovered the origins of political and geopolitical turmoil in human disarray, in the family, in the individual soul. The play “Julius Caesar” is the best example, where envy and ambition are the cause of war, of “domestic fury and fierce civil strife,” as Mark Antony says.
Over the past 22 years, Mr. Putin has made the Russian state a complicated machine that only he knows how to run. He has also eviscerated all organized opposition parties and movements. A popular uprising—caused by losses in the war, by economic woes, by Mr. Putin’s own arrogance and growing appetite for repression—could topple him.
A new leader, even one who could command the support of the military and the security services, would face the difficult task of either building from scratch or perpetuating the Putinist machine. The likelihood of failure in either endeavor is high. In the absence of a constitution, an established elite or a track record in power, a failing government could attract further revolutions—or the attention of an aspiring tyrant.
One way or another, Russia will suffer from the immense brittleness of Mr. Putin’s political legacy. A new regime could use state coercion to prop itself up for decades. Without such coercion, radical change is possible but could lead to chaos—the prospect of which is, alas, a motivation for Russia’s conservative institutions to try to retain their iron grip on the status quo.
Mr. Kimmage is a professor of history at Catholic University. From 2014 to 2016, he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio on the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: An End to Russia’s Providential Aspirations
Vladimir Putin is mortal, but is Russia’s great power status, too?
Mr. Putin has lamented the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a geopolitical tragedy, but who has done more harm to Russian interests: Mikhail Gorbachev, who unintentionally broke up the Soviet Union and freed Russia, or Mr. Putin, who has degraded Russian power and blackened its image? Even before he leaves this Earth—and regardless of who or what replaces him—he may bring down the curtain on Russia as an aggressive player on the world stage.
Under Mr. Putin, Russia has hemorrhaged its most valuable resource—the human talent essential to today’s tech economy. Russia has suffered further degradation of its Soviet-era infrastructure, and the regime’s corruption has corroded state institutions to their core, even its vaunted military. And because of his aggression against Ukraine and manipulation of his country’s role as the principal energy supplier to Europe, Russia’s days as an energy superpower, which date back a half-century, appear to be numbered.
Russia’s longstanding pursuit of a global position beyond its means has led it, again and again, to autocratic rule.
Mr. Putin has also settled the argument on the wisdom of NATO expansion, galvanizing even Finland and Sweden to join. He has cratered Russian influence in its own region, not just in a now profoundly pro-Western Ukraine but even in Armenia, a neighbor matched only by Belarus in its loyalty to Moscow. Mr. Putin has also accelerated Beijing’s consolidation of a Chinese-dominated Greater Eurasia, a commercial and security bridge to Europe that bypasses Russia.
In short, Mr. Putin’s autocracy has shown that it cannot cultivate the new economy, face down the West or manage the asymmetry with China.
Russia’s longstanding pursuit of a global position beyond its means—its aspiration to be a providential power, with a special mission in the world—has led it, again and again, to autocratic rule. This, in turn, has worsened the very challenge it was meant to address: Russia’s weakness vis-à-vis the West. Failure, repeat.
The damage done by Mr. Putin has been so profound, however, that it might finally break the cycle. A defeat in Ukraine, coming on top of the damage he has done to Russia’s great power aspirations, could pave the way to a country that, while remaining a significant power because of its size and resources, invests in its people and long-term internal development.
That shift would require institutional limits on executive power and some degree of the rule of law. It could result in a Russia that, if not fully Western, finally prefers the mutual benefit of living peacefully alongside its neighbors.
No one should doubt Mr. Putin’s capacity for a great deal more criminal escalation, however much it might backfire. But Russia is at a potential inflection point. Even if Mr. Putin isn’t soon displaced, he might deliver, against his will, a status for Russia that finally proves to be stable.
Mr. Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929—1941.”
AMY KNIGHT: Opening the Door to Democratic Forces
Although Vladimir Putin has portrayed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a struggle against aggression by the U.S. and its NATO allies, who allegedly control Ukraine and are intent on destroying Russia, his main motivation is a long-held fear that Ukrainian democracy could spread across the border to undermine his own autocratic regime. By replacing the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky with one controlled by Moscow, Mr. Putin planned to eliminate the contagion of Ukrainian democracy and also to strengthen his image among Russians as a leader who stands up to the West and defends his country’s greatness.
But Mr. Putin’s plans appear to be backfiring. The war in Ukraine has been a dismal failure and has made him a pariah among global leaders, not to mention the enormous economic toll on Russia, which will only worsen. It was one thing to conduct what Mr. Putin at first called a “special operation” in Ukraine, with a complacent public shielded from news about military setbacks. But once a broader conscription was announced in September, Russians became aware that the conflict was a war for which they might have to sacrifice. The stakes for Mr. Putin became much higher. According to a former Russian adviser to the U.N., Mr. Putin “understands that if he loses the war in Ukraine, he is finished.”
Viewed as a technocrat, Mr. Mishustin might be able to present himself to the Russian people as a peacemaker tasked with cleaning up Mr. Putin’s mess.
If the Russian military cannot turn the tide in its favor, the Kremlin could eventually have to withdraw from Ukraine without any territorial gains, even giving up the Donbas and Crimea. It would face massive reparation payments and charges of war crimes. Mr. Putin might then be forced by members of his ruling elite, with support from disaffected elements in the military or security services, to exit the Kremlin, perhaps citing illness.
But who would take his place? Mr. Putin’s close allies in the ruling elite have publicly supported the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, and they too bear responsibility for its failures. So it is unlikely that hard-liners like Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev or Russia’s erstwhile president Dmitry Medvedev, who has become an outspoken warmonger, would be designated by the usurpers to assume Mr. Putin’s mantle.
According to the Russian constitution, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin would become Russia’s acting president if Mr. Putin leaves office early. Viewed as a technocrat, Mr. Mishustin has wisely refrained from speaking out about the war and isn’t seen as part of the hard-line camp. He might thus be able to negotiate an end to the war and present himself to the Russian people as a peacemaker tasked with cleaning up Mr. Putin’s mess.
But the Russian constitution requires that a presidential election be called within three months, which would give Mr. Mishustin little time to establish his credibility as a leader. And in the interim, social unrest might emerge. Ironically, instead of eliminating Ukrainian democracy, Mr. Putin’s war might end up providing an opportunity for democratic forces in his own country to reassert themselves.
Ms. Knight is the author of six books on Russian history and politics, including, most recently, “Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder.”
MICHAEL MCFAUL: Less Repression at Home, More Engagement Abroad
For two decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a fantastic run. An accidental president plucked from obscurity by former President Boris Yeltsin in 2000, he came to power at the perfect moment, when oil and gas prices soared after a decadelong economic depression.
Mr. Putin destroyed Russian democratic institutions and arrested or drove into exile his most prominent political critics. Society tolerated this repression in return for economic growth and a sense of stability. He also won or made gains in four wars—Chechnya 1999-2000, Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014 and Syria 2015—fueling the narrative that Russia had returned as a great power.
But then, like many dictators after decades in power, he overreached when invading Ukraine. Mr. Putin has failed to achieve most of his war objectives—taking Kyiv, overthrowing the regime, uniting the Slavic nation—so he has scaled back his aims to annexing four Ukrainian regions. Even this campaign is faltering. To pursue it, he was compelled to draft tens of thousands of new conscripts, which so far has mobilized as many Russians to flee the country as to join the army.
The odds that Mr. Putin’s regime will recover from this war are much longer than the odds of its collapsing. But we don’t know how or when the unraveling will play out. As with Brezhnev after his similarly fateful overreach in Afghanistan, Mr. Putin will hold on to power until he is no longer physically able to rule. That could be a long time. After Mr. Putin, however, the disgruntled forces for change will gradually become more powerful than those seeking to continue Putinism.
Already, Mr. Putin has lost almost all of Russia’s economic elites. Virtually none of them support the war. He has also lost many of his generals, who were dragged into this senseless war due to bad intelligence.
Thirst for imperial conquest and annexation was never high among Russians. In defeat, it will disappear.
Most threatening to Russian autocracy, Mr. Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine has consolidated opposition to his regime among the best and the brightest. Even in a country where polling is very imperfect—it is dangerous to express your preferences truthfully, so nonresponse rates are high—surveys suggest that the younger, richer, more urban and more educated you are, the less likely you are to support Mr. Putin. If they don’t all emigrate, this group will only grow in size and power.
Since the war began, and especially since conscription was announced, the consumption of independent media operating mostly from abroad and YouTube channels affiliated with the opposition leader Alexei Navalny has skyrocketed. Some percentage of Russians do support the war, but their numbers will continue to shrink. Thirst for imperial conquest and annexation was never high among Russians. In defeat, it will disappear.
After Stalin, came Khrushchev. After Brezhnev, came Gorbachev. After Mr. Putin will eventually come leaders and movements in favor of less repression at home and greater engagement with the West.
Mr. McFaul is the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and served as U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation in 2012-14.
SEVA GUNITSKY: Collective Leadership May Be Russia’s Best Option
There are only two ways Vladimir Putin can depart the Kremlin: by dying in office or being removed by members of his own inner circle. Neither guarantees a better future for Russia or a more stable foreign policy. The sources of tension between Russia and the West—over Russia’s so-called sphere of influence, over the security architecture of Europe and ultimately over the future of the global order—are structural and transcend the desires of any particular Russian leader.
If Mr. Putin dies in office, elite intrigue will likely follow, because Mr. Putin has not named a successor and even if he were to do so, there is no reason to assume his wishes would be respected. Certainly the preferences of dying leaders have been flouted in the past: Stalin succeeded Lenin despite the latter’s objections, and Konstantin Chernenko followed Yuri Andropov, who had stated his preference for Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr. Putin’s removal in a palace coup is a more remote possibility, but the outcome would be similar. The plotters would likely be members of the security forces who make up his inner circle, because they were unhappy with his prosecution of the war or come to see him as vulnerable. A clutch of such operatives would be left to struggle over leadership.
Such a struggle, whether protracted and violent or brief and administrative, is the likely outcome no matter how Mr. Putin leaves office. The question will be what emerges from it: another Putin-like figure who would consolidate power under his personal rule, or a leadership structure in which a Politburo-like oligarchy exercises collective power.
Mr. Putin’s personalist style has not worked well for Russia. By concentrating power in private hands, this kind of autocracy breeds corruption and undermines state capacity. Under Mr. Putin, it has also led to unchecked aggression in foreign policy. Personalist regimes, research suggests, are more likely to start wars and to create misery for their own people. Collective leadership, while far from a perfect solution, may be able to curb those tendencies.
Even under the best scenario, however, Mr. Putin’s departure will not resolve many of the problems between Russia and the West. For Russia, the obstacles to cooperation are deep; they include the fear of encirclement, competition over influence in Eastern Europe and conflict over Russia’s place in a global order. How these tensions are handled will depend on the nature of Russian leadership. A return to oligarchic decision-making is the best hope for moderating impulses that tend toward conflict and repression. But it is just as plausible to imagine that from the infighting that follows Mr. Putin’s departure will emerge another Putin-like ruler, harboring similar grievances and taking even more aggressive steps to rectify them.
Mr. Gunitsky is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of “Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century.”
ANDREI SOLDATOV: Rebuilding From Scratch
I have been writing about Russia’s security services for more than 20 years—inside of Russia until 2020 and now from exile. I have sought to answer the question of how they might one day become normal, which is to say, like the security services of a democratic country. The invasion of Ukraine has led me to believe that such a transformation will be impossible.
Should there be a democratic transition, Russia’s security services will have to be completely disbanded and rebuilt from scratch. The same is true of Russia’s parliament, military and higher education system, which have been distorted beyond the possibility of reform during Vladimir Putin’s decades in power. They have been complicit in repression and war crimes, whether directly or by helping Putin to secure an astonishing level of support for the war.
The result of the present war, no matter how it ends on the battlefield, will be many years of Russian isolation.
Our parents did not feel this way in the late 1980s. In the years before the Soviet Union collapsed, many Russians believed that if the country could just get rid of the Communist party and the KGB, it would find its way to normalcy. To leave the Soviet past behind did not require major institutions to be completely destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. This view was naïve, as we all see today, but such optimism made possible the reforms of the 1990s. Most of us are not so optimistic today, and support for democratic reform is not nearly as widespread as it once was.
As the Cold War ended, both Soviets and Westerners believed that a post-communist U.S.S.R. could become European in a matter of years. That view is gone forever. The result of the present war, no matter how it ends on the battlefield, will be many years of Russian isolation. The Western world has grown tired of Mr. Putin and, by extension, Russia.
Those who want to stay connected to a world outside Russia’s borders have already left or are leaving. They are the most intellectual part of Russian society, whose body cannot survive without a brain. A new intellectual elite will take its place—one that is much narrower and less engaged with the outside world.
In post-Putin Russia, there will be no popular demand for democratic reforms and no intelligentsia to promote them. The only hope for a better future will lie with the efforts of the Russian diaspora, maintaining its ties to the country through the internet.
Mr. Soldatov is an investigative journalist and the author of “The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin.”
Why does the last writer think that all the intelligentsia will leave? Even if they leave. couldn't some of them come back later on to help transform Russia for the better?
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