A FORMER EMPIRE CONSUMING ITS FUTURE
Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
Today’s Russian Federation miserably resembles the already dead Soviet Union during Leonid Brezhnev’s final years: outwardly still formidable, internally stagnant, and governed by an aging political order terrified of every reform that might expose its accumulated failures. The former insignificant lieutenant colonel of the also defunct KGB Vladimir Putin presents himself as the Messiah who rescued Mother Russia from the ruins of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In reality, he has merely reconstructed many of the conditions that made that collapse unavoidable.
However, this comparison should not be exaggerated. Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. It possesses a rudimentary market economy, private property, more flexible commercial institutions, and less of the USSR’s universal Communist ideology. Yet, an underlying political pathology is remarkably similar. Once again, stability has become another word for stagnation. Loyalty has replaced merit-based competence. Military power conceals civilian backwardness. Energy revenues postpone reforms. Official statistics disguise deterioration. Above all, the tyrant’s fear of change has become more important than the country’s need for renewal.
Just a quick reminder: Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union appeared permanent until it disappeared for good in the garbage dump of history. It possessed thousands of nuclear weapons, dominated Central and Eastern Europe, armed so-called revolutionary movements across the globe, and sent men into space. Foreign “Kremlin Experts” saw a superpower. Soviet citizens saw something else: decaying infrastructure, technological backwardness, shortages, alcoholism, corruption, and a leadership class that had lost both creativity and conviction.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia presents a similar contradiction. It can manufacture missiles, but cannot create a competitive civilian economy. It can destroy Ukrainian power stations, but cannot modernize much of its own provincial infrastructure. It can mobilize hundreds of thousands of men for war, while confronting an increasingly severe shortage of workers. It can threaten Europe with nuclear annihilation, while becoming economically and technologically dependent on the People’s Republic of China. This is not greatness. It is the tyrannical militarization of the next assured collapse.
Russia’s wartime economy initially confounded predictions of immediate collapse. Energy exports continued. Trade was redirected through the People’s Republic of China, India, Turkey, and Central Asia. Capital controls stabilized the ruble. Government orders revived weapons factories. High military salaries and death benefits poured money into some of Russia’s poorest regions. Yet, wartime production is not synonymous with national development. A missile may increase gross domestic product when it is manufactured; after it explodes, it leaves Russia neither richer nor more productive. A dead soldier’s compensation payment raises household income, but it does not restore the worker, father, or future taxpayer whom the country lost. A tank assembled to replace one destroyed in Ukraine represents activity without progress. The Russian state is consuming capital, labor, machinery and human life to reproduce what the war destroys. It resembles a man burning his furniture to heat his house and then boasting about the strength of the fire.
The resemblance to the Brezhnev period is equally striking politically. Under Brezhnev, the Communist Party ceased to be a revolutionary movement and became a distribution system for offices, privileges, and protection. Officials advanced by avoiding responsibility and telling their superiors what they wished to hear. The result was a government that collected enormous quantities of information, while becoming progressively incapable of recognizing reality.
Putin has recreated this system without the Communist Party. Personal loyalty to him has replaced loyalty to Marxism-Leninism. Russia’s Parliament ratifies decisions; its courts sanctify them; its national television explains them; and its security services punish those who question them. The state may be highly centralized, but centralization does not guarantee good governance. When bad news threatens careers, false information becomes the regime’s most common internal currency. This helps explain the disastrous assumptions behind the lawless invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s government expected the Ukrainian state to disintegrate, its political leadership to flee, and its people to sheepishly accept Russian domination. These errors were not merely military miscalculations. They were products of a tyrannical system, in which contradicting the ruler had become more dangerous than misleading him.
However, Russia has adapted since the lawless invasion. Its military has improved its use of drones, electronic warfare, fortifications and mass production. It remains capable of inflicting terrible destruction. Yet, tactical adaptation cannot reverse strategic failure. Putin invaded Ukraine to erase Ukrainian national identity, construct NATO enlargement, and restore Russian influence over Europe. The results were exactly the opposite. He strengthened Ukrainian identity, expanded NATO, and persuaded much of Europe to rearm against Russia. Even territorial gains cannot erase those consequences. Putin may conquer land, while losing Russia’s future.
The Soviet parallel becomes still more revealing when the People’s Republic of China is considered. During Brezhnev’s rule, the Kremlin regarded Beijing as a dangerous, but inferior Communist rival. Today, Beijing is the dominant economic partner. Russia supplies heavily discounted oil, gas, and raw materials; Beijing supplies machinery, electronics, vehicles, manufactured goods, and commercial lifelines. This paradoxical relationship is called a partnership because the Kremlin publicly cannot call it dependence. Clearly, Beijing does not want Russia to collapse again. A functioning, anti-Western Russia diverts American attention and supplies Beijing with resources. Yet, Beijing has no interest in restoring Russia as an equal superpower. Its ideal Russia is sufficiently strong to trouble the West and sufficiently weak to accept Chinese terms. Consequently, Putin’s campaign to restore Russian greatness, has produced one of history’s finest ironies: Putin’s Russia has become the junior partner of the country whose long-term economic and geographic strength most clearly overshadows it.
Yet, the greatest resemblance to the late Soviet period may concern what comes after Putin. Brezhnev’s death was followed by the terminally ill former KGB leader Yuriy Andropov, who sought greater discipline without fundamental reforms, Brezhnev’s former driver Konstantin Chernenko, whose incompetent rule made things even worse, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried to save the Soviet system by opening as well as restructuring it. Gorbachev’s error was that he preferred stagnation over reform. Once censorship weakened and fear started to recede, every suppressed grievance emerged simultaneously.
Putin’s successor will inherit the same conundrum. Russia cannot recover without reducing military expenditures, confronting corruption, restoring professional government, improving relations with the West, and allowing some degree of intellectual as well as economic freedom. Yet, each reform would threaten groups whose wealth and security depend upon “Putinism.” Relaxing censorship would encourage questions about the war’s casualties and purposes. Strengthening courts would endanger officials who accumulated fortunes through political protection. Decentralization would embolden the regions. Genuine elections would expose the emptiness of the ruling party. Peace with Ukraine would require admitting that years of sacrifice failed to achieve the promised victory. Thus, the reforms required to rescue Russia from another collapse could destabilize the regime that ruined it.
The most realistic future is neither democratic revolution nor national disintegration. It is prolonged stagnation: a poorer, harsher, and more militarized Russia, increasingly isolated from Europe, and dependent on the People’s Republic of China. Putin may remain in power; an appointed successor may preserve “Putinism” without Putin; or a security-centered collective leadership may attempt to manage the explosive inheritance. More importantly, personal tyrannies rarely solve succession. Putin has weakened every institution capable of transferring authority peacefully. There is no genuine governing party, independent Parliament, accepted constitutional arbiter, or undisputed crown prince. There are only competing factions united by their dependence on one man. When that man disappears, their shared loyalty will disappear with him.
The final lesson of the Brezhnev era is not that Russia must collapse tomorrow. The Soviet Union stagnated for years, while Western “Kremlinologists” alternated between predicting its imminent demise, and exaggerating its permanence. Tyrannies can endure astonishing dysfunction because repression conceals weakness and their subjects learn to survive without hope. Their collapse appears sudden only because their decay was hidden.
Putin has restored Russia’s ability to frighten, destroy, and obstruct. He has not restored its greatness. A great state creates more than it consumes, attracts more than it intimidates, and leaves its successors a stronger country than it inherited. By that standard, Putin is not the rebuilder of Russia. He is a latter-day Brezhnev – presiding over a military stagnation, confusing silence with unity, and sacrificing tomorrow to preserve his rule today.
Russia’s enduring tragedy is not that it lacks the resources to become prosperous, respected, and secure. Its tragedy is that its successive tyrants continue to believe Russia can be great only when its neighbors are consumed by fear. The Soviet Union followed this belief into oblivion. Putin’s Russia walks the same path to another assuredly coming collapse.