Putinism as a New Autocracy: Delegation, Depoliticization, and War

Putin’s main premise about Russia is simple: the country needs a strong state. Putin’s regime does not ask Russians to choose between strong statehood and autocracy; it presents them as the same thing under Russian conditions. His foundational move was to answer an institutional question - what form can a strong Russian state take? - with a specific and politically powerful claim: the only practically workable model was the vertical of power, with a small, insulated ruling circle at the apex, protected from direct pressure by particular social, regional, or economic groups. Russia's diversity, on this account, is too deep and the centrifugal risks too real for any dispersion of power - into competing federal units, rival institutions, or pluralist electoral competition - to hold. Only a protected apex can balance the diversity rather than be captured by it. The ruling circle does not represent one interest against others; it stands above all interests and adjudicates between them by necessary means. Depoliticization - the removal of society from direct political agency - is not the suppression of Russia but the precondition for the state's capacity to serve Russia as a whole. Beyond political sphere the regime not only allows but even encourages delegation. I will illustrate this using the examples of civil society and the relationship between Moscow and the regions.

Irina Busygina is Research Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include Russian domestic and foreign policy and federalism and decentralization in authoritarian settings.