In recent days several Russian bloggers—both loyalists and oppositionists—have hinted about plots to remove Putin. Even though most such reports are based on little more than gossip, they serve the useful function of reminding us that Putin’s clock is running down.
Besides the fact that the life expectancy for Russian males of Putin’s age cohort is around 65 years and Putin is now 73, there is the raw fact that he has been president (or controlled the presidency) for a quarter century. This far surpasses the 14 year average for heads of the Communist Party from 1917 to 1991—a figure that excludes the three General Secretaries who served an average of less than a year each. Indeed, it even beats the 23 year average reign for the ten Russian tsars since Peter the Great, not counting four who survived less than three years.
Leaving aside these statistical probabilities, it is clear to many knowledgeable Russians that Putin’s reign and life are both nearing their end. It remains to be seen if he finds a means of staying in power without the use of serious force. But even if he does—which daily becomes less likely—it is past time to consider what comes next. Kremlinologists are already drafting possible scenarios. With due respect to their efforts, it is also useful to ask how the transitions between rulers took place in Russia’s past. For in spite of how much the world has changed, there are recurring patterns in Russian history that should not be ignored.
In Russia, transitions in leadership have never been simple. True, Yeltsin passed power to Putin uneventfully, but only because Putin had agreed not to prosecute Yeltsin or his family after he left office. By contrast, the transitions that followed the deaths of Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev were all messy and prolonged, passing through several phases before a new leader emerged, in these cases Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
Russia’s leadership transitions since 1917 are few in number and offer only limited insights on what might happen after Putin’s demise. However, Russia’s experience over the two centuries preceding the Bolshevik revolution is also relevant, for in most cases the change led to abrupt changes of direction and national strategy.
For example, the death of Peter the Great in 1725 at age 53 led to years of confusion until 1741, when his daughter Elizabeth, backed by the officer corps, seized the throne. After Elizabeth II’s death in 1762 the legitimate heir ruled as Peter III for only seven months before he was arrested and killed by henchmen of his German born wife, who became Catherine II and ruled down to her death in 1796. After her death the transition to her unstable thirty-four year old son, Paul I, was smooth, but he took as his mission to root out every trace of his mother’s legacy.
To this end the young tsar introduced the first laws limiting the institution of serfdom, which his mother had strengthened, and he cut back some of the privileges that Catherine had extended to the nobility. His undoing arose from the collapse of a clumsy anti-British coalition he had engineered. A small band of senior military officers considered him insane and demanded that he abdicate. When Paul refused they murdered him.
Following the assassination of his father, the heir, Alexander I, abruptly changed course. A dreamer influenced by French philosophes, he reined in the secret police and instituted reforms, including a new legal system and a parliamentary body. The young Alexander even toyed with the idea of abolishing serfdom by inviting English Quakers to concoct a scheme to provide Russia’s toilers with land of their own. All this came to naught even before Napoleon’s invasion, following which the disillusioned tsar resigned himself to religious musings and eventually fled from public activity.
Alexander’s son Nicholas assumed power in 1825 after the army quelled an armed uprising by pro-reform members of Russa’s elite. Once more the new ruler turned his back on his predecessor’s policies. Nicholas I (called by his critics “Nicholas the Stick”) reinvigorated the secret police and used them as a cudgel against those who disagreed with him. He rebuilt the army and seized territories in southeastern Europe and the Caucasus. Unfortunately for Russia—and eerily anticipating Putin—the vain Nicholas I devoted far more attention to fancy uniforms and parades than to building railroads or equipping his army with the rifled bore firearms that had become standard for western European armies.
Nicholas I’s rule came to a disastrous end with its defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-1856 by a coalition of French, British and Sardinian forces—all dequipped with rifled guns. There was talk in official circles of assassinating the tsar but this ended when the ruler, not yet sixty, succumbed to pneumonia.
On his death bed, Nicholas I counseled his son, the future Alexander II, to stick with the militaristic strategy that over three decades had defined Russian policies at home and abroad. But the entire cadre of leaders associated with Nicholas I—both military and civilian—had been utterly discredited and the thirty-seven year-old Alexander II knew it. It was past time for a new generation of Russians to assume power.
In one of the sharpest transitions in Russian history, Alexander II attracted a remarkable band of experts into government service. The tsar’s new team developed a legal system based on German models, instituted elective self-government at the provincial level, and emancipated the ninety percent of Russians who were serfs…two years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But when Alexander II tried to recruit Poles into his reformed army, the Poles revolted and the ensuing fighting brought an end to his reforms. The tsar himself limped along to 1881, when he was killed by a terrorist bomb.
The reign of Alexander II’s son followed the playbook of Nicholas I. The thirty-six year old Alexander III rolled back what was left of his father’s reforms and imposed chauvinism, militarism, and antisemitism as the cornerstones of his policy. This continued to his death in 1894, when the coronation of his twenty-six year old son gave rise to fresh expectations of reform. But the young Nicholas II had little desire to rule and allowed his father’s regime to continue largely intact down to 1905, when revolutionary turmoil at home and the destruction of Russia’s fleet by a modernized Japanese navy forced change.
Military defeat and domestic turmoil once more combined to usher in a new era of reform, this time amidst the reign of a weak ruler rather than at its start. Reformers again came to the fore, in this case Petr Stolypin, whom Nicholas II named Prime Minister. Drawing on the model of Denmark, Stolypin turned over communal land to individual peasant families and introduced a Peasant Land Bank, all the while assuring Russia’s elites that they would control the Duma. This last gasp of reform continued until a revolutionary murdered Stolypin in 1911 and a coup by elite politicians brought about the collapse of tsarism in February, 1917.
From these diverse moments of transition at least four conclusions are warranted.
First, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fewer than half of the transitions were free from crises.
Second, over the same period four reigns ended with the leader’s violent death, with two of them instigated by regime insiders and the other two by outsiders motivated by radical ideologies.
Third, in cases where the transition occurred without conflict, the successor rulers tended to be weaker versions of their predecessors, not innovators.
And, fourth, the surest guarantor of reform in Russia over the past three centuries was military defeat. This was dramatically manifested in the Era of Great Reforms following Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, and by the Stolypin reforms that followed Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905.
While Vladimir Putin has yet to lose the war in Ukraine, his battlefield record there is poor, the price in human lives and equipment vast, and the war’s negative impact on Russia’s near-term future profound. In light of Putin’s comparatively advanced age and of Russia’s deeper history, this gives credence to the expectation that following his departure or death the existing leadership class will quickly be ushered off stage and a younger and reform-minded class will take its place …at least until a new foreign crisis wells up.