One lesson from the history of the Soviet Union is that dictatorships can last a very long time even if their economic basis is weak. But another is that the collapse of a dictatorship can eventually come unexpectedly: A regime that controls the military, the police and the media is also one that seeks to prevent signs of dissent or other divisions from becoming visible.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the modern descendant of the Soviet Union and the same lessons have applied to his country ever since he began to turn a fragile democracy into a dictatorship after he first became president in 2000. Which is why it is now time to start to think seriously about what might happen in Russia after Putin’s regime collapses.
During his more than a quarter century in control of the Kremlin, there has always been dissent. Putin’s style has been to prevent that dissent from becoming a serious, organized threat to his regime by imprisoning or killing opponents such as Boris Nemtsov (who was murdered in 2015 on a Moscow street) or Alexei Navalny (who was imprisoned in 2021 and then murdered in prison in 2024).
He did not seek to silence dissent entirely until he ordered his attempted invasion of Ukraine in 2022, after which speaking or protesting against the war became an arrestable offense.
Recently, however, a few brave voices have begun to be heard, daring to state the obvious truth: that Putin’s war has been a failure that has harmed Russia. The latest to do this was a man called Andrei Klepach, chief economist of a state-owned bank, VEB. He has lost his job but has not been imprisoned or killed, at least not yet.
There have also been others, most notably Russia’s richest oligarch, Andrei Melnichenko, who chose to speak out in early July by the very public means of a long interview and personal essay in The Economist. While some believe that Melnichenko’s intervention might have been an elaborate piece of disinformation organized by the Kremlin itself, designed to fool outsiders, it looks likelier that Putin felt forced to allow Melnichenko to publish his essay as a sort of safety valve to prevent dissent among the elite from become dangerous.
The Russian political system is too closed to allow outsiders to do anything other than make guesses about what might really be going on. Nevertheless, the signs of weakness and of discontent are becoming too numerous to ignore or discount.
Putin’s recent visit to the occupied Northern Territories in the Kuril Islands chain, which caused diplomatic anger and concern in Japan, may also have been a sign of this: For months now he has been too afraid of Ukrainian missile and drone attacks to appear in public places on the Russian mainland, so the main explanation for the visit may have been that the Kuril Islands were one of the few places far enough away from Ukrainian missiles to enable him safely to be filmed on television meeting ordinary people.
The fact that Putin’s visit was also a provocation against Japan for its participation in sanctions against Russia and its support for Ukraine may just have been a coincidental bonus.
Rather than focusing on making diplomatic protests about Putin’s visit, the Japanese government should be making plans for how it might try to exploit a future change of regime in Moscow.
Nothing Japan does or says now about the Northern Territories will have any influence on Putin. But if Putin were to be replaced – which, if it were to happen, would be likely to involve some form of violence by dissenters in or close to the Kremlin and so could cause chaos and further violence – then it is possible that whoever replaced him might want to improve relations with Japan by changing Russia’s stance on the islands.
It is a small chance, but a chance worth preparing for. We should certainly hope that plans already exist within the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for how to deal with this sort of opportunity.
Russia’s war with Ukraine is not going so badly for Putin as to turn this possibility of regime change into a probability, at least not yet.
Ukraine’s long-range missile and drone attacks have certainly weakened the Russian economy by damaging energy infrastructure as well as military logistics, and have succeeded in bringing fear to the citizens of Moscow as well as other big cities. Ukraine has also won back some territory from the Russian invaders on the military frontline in southern Ukraine and each month is causing more Russian casualties than the Russian military is able to replace with recruitment.
On the other hand, Ukraine’s severe shortage of the best interceptors, the American Patriot missiles, means that it is now unable to defend itself against regular massive attacks on Kyiv and other big cities by Russian ballistic missiles, so there has been a big rise in the number of Ukrainian civilians dying every day.
America’s war in Iran has caused a global shortage of Patriot interceptors. Any supporter of Ukraine – which includes Japan, where Patriots are manufactured on licence – should be rushing to send Ukraine as many interceptors as can be spared.
Moreover, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is facing plenty of dissent of his own, in particular from his young and popular former defense minister, Mykhailo Federov, who has begun to campaign for Ukraine to hold a general election even though this is barred by law from happening during wartime.
In military terms, Russia’s war in Ukraine currently looks like a deadly stalemate, with neither side holding a decisive advantage. But in political terms, Ukraine looks in the stronger position: its democracy can cope with dissent, especially as the country’s fight for survival is a fight to preserve its free, democratic political system. The voices of dissent that are beginning to be heard inside Russia’s tightly controlled dictatorship suggest that it is Putin’s Russia that might be more fragile than Zelenzkyy’s Ukraine.
There is no way to be sure of this. Almost the only thing we can be sure of is that North Korea is the only country to be benefitting from Russia’s war in Ukraine, thanks to the military supplies it is selling to Putin and to the technological help it is getting in return, and now even from Donald Trump’s declared desire to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un later this year.
Nevertheless, the lesson from 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union is also clear: wise governments and companies should now be making contingency plans for the possibility that Putin might soon follow the same path as his former Soviet employers followed 35 years ago, the path to the exit door.
Republished with permission from Bill Emmott’s Global View, this is the English original of an article published in Japanese and English by Mainichi Shimbun, in its Jidai no Kaze (Winds of Our Time) column.
