#kotkin

I have long been calling the Putin regime “hollow yet still strong.” It remained, and remains, viable as long as there is no political alternative. Now, we might see just how hollow the regime is. Putin has unwittingly launched a stress test of his own regime. He had already lost his mystique with the bungling of the aggression against Ukraine. Mystique, once lost, is near impossible to regain. The old cliché about the emperor and clothes. He still possesses enormous power, rooted in structures he built around himself, such as his Praetorian Guard, and those he unbuilt—his razing of the landscape of political possibilities besides himself, and severe repression to demobilize the populace.

There is one thing that all dictators properly fear: an alternative. And Putin, shockingly, after years and years of indefatigably suppressing alternatives, of promoting nonentities to his inner circle to ensure no one could threaten him, has allowed one to take shape. Pinch me.

Authoritarian regimes build up formidable military and security services, but these are purposely divided against themselves by the leader, to control them, to make them dependent on him. The leader deliberately gives them overlapping jurisdictions, heightens their inherent rivalries at every turn, and sits back and watches, usually with glee. But in this case, Putin has conjured up his own nemesis.

I’ve been saying for some time that the way to get Putin’s attention, to destabilize his regime, was to identify and recruit a defector from the inside, a Russian nationalist, a person who appeals to Putin’s base, but one who recognized the separate existence of a Ukrainian nation and state. Preferably a defector in uniform. And Putin has gifted us a candidate.

[...] No matter how Putin responds, it seems like he’s at risk of losing his grasp.

[...] This could peter out quickly. Putin is a survivor. A sense that the Russian state is at risk could rally the various rivalrous factions around him.

Here’s the bottom line: even if it is now snuffed out, an alternative was allowed to arise. All this unfolded in real time, on video, over months and months. Putin did not intervene earlier and allowed things to get to this point. Stunning. Either he has descended into utter incompetence or he has less operational control than his media machine has been letting on. Or both. I expected him to be better at Authoritarianism 101. I expected him to understand this was the one threat in real time. I expected him to end the games, end the pitting of rivals against each other to control them, because it had become dangerous to him personally. I overestimated him. I would not want to make the opposite mistake and underestimate him now, though. 

What is the right historical parallel here?

I already mentioned 1917, because Putin himself evoked it and not the Soviet implosion of 1991, which he lived through and has reflected on often. But the remarkable aspect for me is not just the eerie sense of the distant past that appears so close, yet again, but the tech and media revolution. I look at that Ukrainian TV production company running this war, I look at the production of the January 6 hearings here in the United States—Liz Cheney’s hearings were run by a TV producer, with powerful effect—and I think, “This is how you do national security most effectively now: with smartphones, videos, memes.” All those written and emailed policy briefs, all those meetings of principals and deputies form the sprawling national security bureaucracies, all that spying and cloak and dagger—and, boom: Telegram and a pair of thumbs.

Art from my collection:

Cities, The Middle Class, and Children

(cross-posted from planetizen.com) In a recent article, Joel Kotkin critiques the work of Jane Jacobs; he points out that Jacobs idealized middle-class city neighborhoods, and suggests that because cities have become dominated by childless rich people, middle-class urbanity “has passed into myth, and… it is never going to come back.” He suggests that Americans are “moving out to the suburbs as…

I'm just getting round to watching this Kotkin - Zizek thing from a few weeks ago. The man is an embarrassment. Anyone who does the amount of leg work that he (or his interns) has done, and then sagely proclaims to the world that the 'big revelation' of the archives is that - the horror! the horror! - people in the Soviet Union were actually communists is fatuous beyond belief. 'Lenin played for keeps. He was for real. I don’t think there would have been a Bolshevik seizure of power without Lenin. He is a major figure… He was for real on communist revolution.' Please, Professor, translate these pearls of acuity into several thousand pages of popular-academic non-sequitur.

Everything about Kotkin here - the ugliness of his vocabulary ('Bukharin didn't have the right skill set', Christ), the fixation on counterfactuals not just as throwaway 'thought experiments' but as a mode of crucial historical analysis (I guess anything that Penguin will pay this much for seems crucial at the time), the way he luxuriates in his retreat into the most tired, cod-psychological 'explanations' for the 1930s ('Where did those demons inside him, where did those snakes in his head come from?') - everything speaks of a man devoid of the kind of basic human insights/empathies that should be the precondition for this kind of work. And that's without mentioning the grotesque, repetitive metaphor of the GermanWings disaster ('he crashed the plane, he crashed the plane', please shut up), or the self-satisfaction of his wondering out loud (! the mic's still on, Stevie) how crazy it is that a normal lower-middle class guy like him should end up writing books on Stalin. If you find it so hard to compute, feel free to just stop.