This was a textbook demonstration of the ‘imitation-democratic’ system in action: all the appearances of electoral democracy with none of the uncertainty. But while the vote posed no problems for the regime internally, it took place at a moment of dramatically heightened external tensions. Two weeks beforehand, on 4 March, the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the quiet English town of Salisbury had immediately been blamed on his former paymasters in the Kremlin. The weapon apparently used, a nerve agent based on the Novichok series developed in the USSR in the 1970s and ’80s, made Russian involvement somewhere along the line – whether by the state or by non-state actors – seem likely. Amid the uproar and conspiracy-mongering the incident unleashed, no convincing explanations were advanced as to why the Russian state would make an already bad situation so much worse for itself. But the mysterious facts of the case were soon enough overshadowed by its consequences: sanctions, tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, closures of consulates. The incident drove already dismal relations between Russia and the West to new lows, making it even harder to imagine a normalization in the near future.
This combination of domestic stability and turmoil on the international front set the parameters for the immediate future of Russia’s imitation-democratic system. But behind the events of early 2018 lay a larger question concerning the system’s long-term prospects. It had been prompted, ironically, by the very ease and inevitability of Putin’s victory. Since it had long been obvious what the outcome of the 2018 elections would be, in the run-up to the vote many minds in Russia turned to the end of Putin’s forthcoming term, when he would be constitutionally ineligible to run again. Who or what would succeed him in 2024? An eerie temporal displacement seemed to have taken place, in which confirmation of Putin’s domestic political dominance was shadowed by thoughts of its eventual end, his success in the present trailed by his future departure from the scene.
What had appeared on the horizon – still distant for now, but visible – would be the end of an era. By early 2018 Putin had effectively outdone Brezhnev’s eighteen years as Soviet leader. Assuming he makes it through to the end of his new mandate, Putin will have ruled his country for a quarter of a century. Perhaps a fifth of the Russian population has never known any other leader. In that sense, the very length of Putin’s hold on power has amplified the problem of succession common to many political systems – how to manage the transition from one leader to the next without massive instability or infighting? Putin’s age and apparent good health seemed to add another layer to the problem: what is a figure who has held such power supposed to do in his retirement? Will Putin be content to retreat gracefully to the wings, leaving the stage clear for a new imitation-democratic figurehead? And – very much related – will his successor be able to shield him from prosecution as Putin himself protected Yeltsin?
But while the urge to speculate about Putin’s personal fate is understandable, it is ultimately misguided. It prolongs the tendency to focus excessively on this single individual in order to understand Russia. The imitation-democratic system has indeed functioned much to the satisfaction of Russia’s elite with Putin in charge. But it is fundamentally a system – that is, a set of power structures and political practices that has enabled Russia’s particular, post-Soviet form of capitalism to thrive. That system can certainly continue with another person at its summit – perhaps less smoothly, or perhaps better. The question we should really be asking, in fact, is not whether the system can function without Putin, but how long it can keep functioning in the same way, regardless of who is in charge.
On the one hand, the outlook for the regime is not especially positive. In addition to a tense international climate and unfavourable economic winds, it must struggle against its own internal exhaustion. The centralizing, neoliberal energies of Putin’s first presidential term have been left behind, and while the patriotic turn after 2012 and the confrontation with the West have certainly helped firm up the regime’s domestic support, they can’t fully compensate for a lack of other motivating ideas or projects. On 1 March 2018 Putin made a speech laying out his governing agenda for the next six years. The part that drew the most attention in the West, inevitably, was his announcement – complete with video animations – of shiny new hypersonic missiles that could get around Western defence systems. The speech also promised increased spending on infrastructure, health care and education, as developmental priorities for the coming decade. But promises of this kind have been made before and proven hollow. The 2018–2020 budget, approved in December 2017, certainly envisaged no significant alterations to the system’s current priorities. If anything, the new government will most likely simply continue the budgetary austerity and ‘optimization’ measures of the past few years, which have brought school and hospital closures even as wages and pensions lag well behind inflation.{2} In mid-June 2018, just as the country was distracted by the start of the World Cup, the government announced a plan to increase the retirement age, by five years for men and eight for women – highly regressive moves which the Kremlin may yet have cause to revisit.
Overall, the Putin government’s aim seems to be an inertial scenario. It has entered what political scientist Yekaterina Schulmann has called ‘calorie-conservation mode’.{3} There is an obvious danger here, of aimless drift or complacent decline. Systems that lose their sense of purpose can rapidly end up losing their grip on power, too, overtaken by emergencies they lacked the imagination or energy to foresee. One possible scenario, indeed, is that the imitation-democratic system will gradually run out of steam, so hollowed out from the inside that it eventually crumbles at the slightest popular pressure.
Yet even once toppled, such regimes have often returned in near-equivalent forms, like strange political revenants. In Georgia, for example, Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration eventually replicated many of the authoritarian behaviours of the Shevardnadze government it displaced; further afield, in Egypt, after the hopeful upheavals of Tahrir Square Sisi took up many of the despotic habits of Mubarak. These repetitions were what Dmitri Furman had in mind when he gave his book on imitation democracies the title Spiral Motion – identifying the tendency, across the post-Soviet space and far beyond, for countries governed by such regimes to find themselves circling through variations on the same governmental theme.{4} Furman’s compelling metaphor describes a default scenario – and implies that something substantive has to change for a country to break out of the spiral and forge a new trajectory.
Russia’s imitation democracy is capable of reproducing itself whether Putin is in charge or not. If it is to be replaced by something substantively different, an alternative to the system as a whole will have to coalesce – not just an anti-Putin who can take the current president’s place. This is no small task, and it would have to be the work of a large-scale movement rather than an elite plot or a few scattered individuals. Yet it’s possible that Putin’s fourth term might provide an opportunity for such a project to begin to take shape. A period of stasis for the ruling system could also be a valuable interval for those ranged against it, allowing Russians to think about what kind of country might await them beyond imitation democracy, and to imagine what a future without Putin would look like.