The timing was good, the timing was bad. Good from the point of view of Russia’s wealth and Putin’s popularity, bad from the point of view of the world situation. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 might have been seen by Putin as only an internal question if NATO had not at the same time conferred membership on seven former Eastern Bloc countries, three of them former Soviet republics, moving the alliance right up to Russia’s western border. It was then that Putin began to suffer not from a too low sense of danger but from one that would quickly become much too high.
And as people often do in times of threat and jeopardy, Putin reverted to the tried and true, in his case “the power vertical.” His rule started out as authoritarianism lite but became less so with each challenge, culminating in the street demonstrations on the eve of his inauguration in May 2012. Economically, hewing to the tried and true meant sticking with gas and oil instead of transforming Russia into a knowledge-based economy that would have involved large numbers of people. Instead, the state and society ended up separate if not opposed, Russia’s perennial tragic conundrum.
And because it did not involve the people enough, the House of Putin will, like the House of the Tsars and the House of the Communists, sooner or later come crashing down. When and with how much suffering is anyone’s guess. All that is sure is that the Russian people, who outlasted Genghis Khan and Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler, will survive the fall of the House of Putin. Surviving is what Russians absolutely do best.
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