In some ways there is a parallel with Leonid Brezhnev, the bushy-eyebrowed General Secretary of the Communist Party between 1964 and 1982. If he is remembered at all these days, it is of how he was in his final years when, almost senile, he slurred scarcely understood speeches that had been written for him, as his country slid towards economic, social and political collapse. The irony is that he had originally risen to power as a tough, effective manager, and the first half of his reign was full of significant achievement, from matching America’s nuclear might to seeing the economy grow. Over time, though, things got harder and his only answer seems to have been adventurism abroad – including embroiling the USSR in a ten-year war in Afghanistan – to distract from stagnation at home. Does this sound at all familiar?
Brezhnev was ill and dying, but is Putin tired? In 2008, he said that he had ‘worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night, and I have given all I could to this work’. Despite recurring rumours about back problems (and a personal vanity that seems at the very least to have led to his using Botox), he seems in good health physically, but what about emotionally? For his fascinating book
In 2017, Putin held a televised meeting with schoolchildren in Sochi. When one of them asked him what he would do when he retires, he replied, ‘I haven’t decided yet if I will leave the presidency.’ In 2018, a question at an investors’ forum about Russia after his reign prompted him to reply, ‘What’s the rush? I’m not going anywhere yet.’ Everyone laughed – some awkwardly, some cheerily.
Certainly the Western assumption is that Putin, having already manipulated the constitutional order to get around term limits once – spending four years as prime minister – is planning on being president for life, and that when his fourth term ends in 2024, he’ll find some way of staying on. If that happens, though, this will reflect failure rather than triumph. After all, at that same gathering in Sochi, he wistfully said, ‘You know, dreams are things that change over time.’
In the 2000s, he was younger, hungrier and, above all, luckier. Since then, everything seems to be getting harder. The challenges he faces are intractable: diversifying a low-productivity economy that is still too dependent on oil and gas while also being increasingly locked away from Western investment and technology, for example, or dealing with a looming demographic crisis as fewer young Russians have to pay for more pensioners. One in eight Russians still lives below the poverty line, and too many of the best and the brightest try to emigrate. His forces are stuck in both Ukraine and Syria, with no clear exit strategy. The Russian people themselves are less grateful, more demanding. There were almost a third more protests in 2018 than in 2017, for example. The Communists, so long content to be a zombie opposition, are now showing signs of life, and organised more than a third of them.
An increasingly bored, disengaged Putin seems to have been looking for a successor for some time, which implies that he is at least contemplating handing over his power – or at least his duties. The insider consensus in Moscow is that he wants to find a new-generation mini-me whom he will be able to trust to protect both himself and his legacy, and also (because trust only gets you so far), to construct a constitutional position to allow him semi-retirement and the chance to interfere in politics without any responsibilities. If he can arrange those, he will likely not even serve his current six-year term. But ‘getting out’ would just mean from the job; Putin will not be the kind of ex-president likely to be hankering after a Caribbean villa, games of golf with other former heads of state and the international speaking circuit.
