Will Yevgeny Prigozhin’s uprising change anything? “The next time something happens in Russia that people do not like,” Keith Gessen writes, “they may not be so worried about going out into the street to say so.”
The Moscow-based historian, who asked that his name not be used since he was still in Russia, recalled what it was like to observe the Politburo in the early nineteen-eighties. “They looked like a totally homogeneous mass,” he said. “There was no indication, in their public statements or in anything else, that any of these people thought differently from one another.” But Gorbachev, it turned out, did think differently.
Among experts thinking about the Russian regime, there are, very roughly speaking, two kinds: those who look at Russian and Soviet history and culture to determine what might happen next, and those who look at Russian authoritarianism in comparative perspective—that is, alongside authoritarian regimes in Egypt and China and. This is also known as the political-science-versus-area-studies debate. The different approaches yield slightly different hypotheses. Before joining the C.I.A.
War is a known stressor for personalist dictatorships, which also tend to start more wars. War puts pressure on the economy and on security services, and also has a way of being unpredictable. Between 1919 and 2003, according to the political scientists Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, nearly half of all rulers who lost wars then lost power within a year. This is true of Russian history as well.
But wars have an upside for authoritarians, too. They offer an excuse to increase repressions and take over the information space. And repression, unfortunately, works. It makes people more fearful of voicing their dissent and of coming out into the street. In the current situation, Kendall-Taylor gave credit to the work of the Russian security services, who have tended to respond to protest with some restraint.
On the other hand, repression’s ability to decrease the flow of information can be dangerous for a regime. People don’t know how dissatisfied other people are—and neither does the government. Kendall-Taylor recalled Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010 and started the
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