Could Putin Lose Power?

Another former C.I.A. analyst, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who was a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia between 2015 and 2018 and now runs the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank, walked me through the political-science literature on how authoritarian regimes tend to fall. Of the four hundred and seventy-three authoritarian regimes that had fallen between 1950 and 2012, a hundred and fifty-three had done so via coup. But the coup was on the wane; after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had stopped propping up quite so many military dictatorships, which are what tend to get militarily couped. It was unlikely, Kendall-Taylor explained, that the security services, or anyone from Putin’s inner circle, would move against the Russian President, because the regime had entered the stage that the political scientist Milan W. Svolik called “established autocracy.” In an established autocracy, the leader has monopolized power to such an extent that he can no longer be threatened by what Svolik calls an “allies’ rebellion.” The truth is, Kendall-Taylor said, most personalist dictatorships, such as Putin’s, ended with the dictator dying in power, especially when the dictator was older than sixty-five (Putin is seventy). “That is by far the most likely scenario,” she told me. She put the chance of regime change in Russia in the next two years at ten per cent, and that “ten per cent includes Putin having a heart attack.”

Read the full story and more from The New Yorker.