I was in Rome listening to some expert takes on late Putinism last week. One presentation was memorable for its thesis that Putin himself is a victim of his own success in removing any possible successors and that as a result his ‘model’ does not have the capacity to ‘reproduce personnel’ who could step comfortably into a leading position when Putinism ends. The beginning of the end of Putinism occurs at the moment when the idea that he can no longer effectively moderate between elites starts to diffuse down the hierarchy and even enters the rank and file.
A second speaker pushed this further: the system enters a dangerous grey zone between personalistic rule and figurehead status; in navigating this zone, everyone must be mindful of frustrated security services actors who cannot be controlled post-Putin because there will be a vacuum of authority. Putin’s personalistic approach is unravelling because there are too many figures within the wider security services (as opposed to the FSO) who do not see a pathway to promotion or meaningful increases in their power while the leader focuses only on the loyalty of a few who guarantee his immediate personal security. This is a degrading of the regime, analogous to what anthropologists call amoral familism, at the expense of genuine corporatism (where a functionary’s identity is tied to his loyalty to an organization, but where he also has the knowledge that his organization has a recognized territory within the state).
These initial two presentations chimed with a third, even more pessimistic one, that saw the war leading to ‘Maduro-ization’ of the state – again, a form of degraded personalism where there can be no loyalty, only the division of a smaller and smaller pie.
Now, these were short presentations, so it would be unfair to accuse them of crystal-ball gazing. Nonetheless as I was listening, I was struck by how theory-light discussions can become. There was plenty of interpretation based on networks, functional organizational analysis, and so on. But what about reviewing some perfectly serviceable political theory of the decomposition of dictatorships that we have had lying around since 1978?
I wrote about Poulantzas’ relevance to Russia just before the invasion and made some quite decent predictions. In short, one insight is that under authoritarian statism, the executive is inevitably as much hostage to conflicting societal and political interests as it is an arbiter, especially when it doesn’t have a coherent or consistent ideology. As Stuart Hall pointed out in his review of Nicos Poulantzas in 1978, theories of ‘authoritarian statism’ need to be complemented by considering how a state works with ‘authoritarian populism’ – though the absence of the latter could explain the fundamental weakness of Putinism, and its rapid degeneration in wartime.
Strictly speaking, Poulantzas kept his analysis of the Greek junta and the Cinquième République apart: authoritarian statism was where the normal French capitalist state was heading, while the Greek junta was an ‘exceptional’ state, built once ‘normal’ forms of coercion had broken down. Putinism began in a situation not so dissimilar to ‘normal authoritarian statism’, and has been stumbling towards exceptionalism since 2012, and hurtling since 2022 – and this is what makes it brittle. Obviously, Russia in 2020, 2022, and 2026 is more like the junta than Cinquième République. And the junta fell in 1974’s Μεταπολίτευση, after factional splits and a counter coup by the military police. Open dysfunction and the Cyprus fiasco (foreign policy overreach, sounds familiar?) put the nails in the coffin.
Crystallization and condensation are key metaphors in Poulantzas. His study of the Greek junta and the French fifth republic taught him about ‘healthy’ re-condensation of forces in a capitalist state, and points of breakdown. Crystallization is not defined consistently but thinking about chemical metaphors we can propose it as a state of affairs where ‘re-condensation’ of forces is blocked. Putinism has crystallized so rigidly at the top that now any tensile application of real force to it will shatter it. Ian Bruff’s take on authoritarian statism was a Poulantzasian approach: beyond brute force against ‘dissenters’, institutional power is remoulded to insulate certain practices from critique or change (corruption, the war, austerity). Appeals to ‘necessity’ replace any kinds of ‘hegemonic aura’ (Ian Bruff’s reading).
Most scenario analyses of Russia like the ones I listened to operate with an essentially instrumentalist logic: the state is merely a machine to be operated by different agents, so the only important question is ‘who wins?’ Poulantzas would put it differently: what is the specific institutional form that has crystallized, and what are the objective contradictions within that form that make it vulnerable to decomposition/shattering regardless of who is at the top?
Russia is more like the Greek junta because the crystallization post-2020 is too unbalanced and too rigid: economic fractions have been completely subordinated, not ‘mobilized’ or used to reengine redistribution. The potential dominant bourgeois class is disorganized by the war. The military-security fractions are ascendant, but the balancing is gone; what were powerful state actors in their own right potentially crystallizing into firm institutional counterweights are now cowed by the actor-network effects of the FSB’s search for disloyalty and ‘corruption’. The popular classes are being told to suck up permanent emergency and isolation from the world. In turn, this signalling has feedback effects on all parts of the crystal – distrust, distrust and more distrust; no communication channels work for elites; stick your head up and the FSB will chop it off.
Poulantzas’ ‘isolation effect’ describes how the state turns the dominated into atomized individuals – voters, taxpayers, the little people – while organizing the dominant classes into a power bloc. That division of labour is rather the point of having a state. In Russia the atomization has boomeranging effects: it is now the elites who cannot talk to each other. Who is atomized now?
As the first and second speakers pondered – there is a Nazarbayev-with-Chekists option, but the window is closing. This is recrystallization as recomposition: Putin as symbolic arbiter, elite renewal, leeway to technocrats under the strict limits of an ‘FSB’-ization of the commanding heights of the state. The problem with this is that the ‘FSB’ (standing in for the security fraction as a whole) can only double down on neostalinist logic that results in ever-expanding circles of repression to ‘explain’ the broader political-economy failure of the Putinist model and its war. No coherent power bloc can exist in this model – which is why 1946-1953 was marked by paralysis.
Decomposition from within – an echo of the Greek junta model: internal contradictions among fractions became unmanageable. If the FSB, the military, Kiriyenko’s bloc, and the gerontocratic establishment cannot reach a new equilibrium, the system implodes under the incongruity of the state’s ‘relative autonomy’. As Carnegie wrote recently: Russia has “an operating apparatus without any internal autonomy”. The power blocs no longer recognize the state as something they answer for. The state bureaucracies no longer function as sites of delegated governance; they function as a threat to each fraction’s position. Security services demand wartime ‘discipline’ in the MIC which cannot be carried out. The military demands wartime economic rationing which the technocratic government cannot carry out. Moscow mayoralty demands exemption from martial law. And so on.
The Crystal shatters – unlikely but plenty of historical precedent and potential. The atomization of the population reaches a threshold where it produces spontaneous, non-organized resistance. Infrapolitics-to-politics of the street, uncivil society, Asef Bayat’s “non-movements,” etc. You don’t need a revolutionary subject to precipitate the transformation of a moribund system. For example, proximate causes might be groups of war veterans who see their benefits taken away and who constitute a new social force the state cannot incorporate into the existing hierarchy. The point is the initial trigger is not predictable and not even that important.
In a Poulantzas-inspired reading, a precondition for shattering would require much more naked repressive apparatus. Are we going in that direction? 2025 survey data (war exhaustion, majority favouring peace talks) is an early indicator: Isolation effects produce not compliance but a latent collective sentiment that the state’s institutional form has no channel to absorb. Detecting this ‘directly’ is difficult, showing the fundamental weakness in the interpretation of polling and one I rehearse a lot in my recent book. Whatever happens, events will ‘anticipate’, not lag, public opinion.
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Sidenote: Previously in this blog, and in my writings on Russia, I have tried to think about state theory and political economy by adapting the ‘strategic-relational approach’ of Bob Jessop, which itself is an update of Gramsci and Poulantzas (contra Miliband): the state is a ‘social relation’ and therefore if we study ‘political society’ we should use a much broader perspective. In parallel to discussions about political society, there’s a strand of critical political economy worth mentioning that considers the compatibility of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. This links people working on Hungary, Poland, the West and Russia. These include Dorit Geva, C. B. Tansel, Ilya Matveev, Adam Fabry, Ian Bruff and Stuart Shields. It’s ironic that in a scholarly field dominated by crystal-ball gazing there’s a mismatch between a focus on elite actors and state practices that holistically theorize authoritarianism beyond adjectival prefixing (electoral, personalist etc). And as Julian Waller points out, few are even interested in investigating authoritarian regimes on their own terms, so to speak.