Putin’s failure should be a warning to ‘strongmen’ leaders around the world

The uprising in Russia by Wagner group leader and long-time Kremlin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin’s forces was no anomalous blip. Entanglements between members of Russia’s elite, like those among both Mexican cartels and the Japanese Yakuza or any other criminal organisation throughout history, frequently end in violence. Dozens and dozens of Russian insiders, including defectors, energy executives and diplomats, have allegedly stabbed themselves repeatedly in the back or jumped out of windows after falling out with the Kremlin.

However, some are already pushing to the forefront a distracting story about a uniquely positioned, eccentric, and toxic 62-year-old – Prigozhin – going insane. Simmering grievances and jealousies with defence secretary Sergei Shoigu and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov over supply chain failures and territorial and human losses in Ukraine pushed him over the edge. “He went nuts and flew into a rage,” a former Kremlin official told the Financial Times.

But if the crisis is about one person, it is Vladimir Putin and no one else. It concerns his Russia. It is about the steady erosion of already frail institutions under his authority since 1999. It is a feature, not a bug, of the personalised, dysfunctional, and lawless nation that he not so much built as allowed to metastasise. More broadly, it demonstrates the unavoidable failures of the strongman model of governance, which appears to have captivated and seduced sizeable numbers of voters all over the world.

The rapid pace of events, combined with Putin’s annihilation of independent journalism in Russia, makes it difficult to ascertain many facts or assess the significance of what has occurred in Russia over the last few days. The Russian armed forces’ vastly superior size, combined with the ideological allegiances of a Wagner force drawn largely from that same military, make a civil war between the two sides all but impossible.

Putin compared Prigozhin’s “treason” to Vladimir Lenin’s October 1917 seizure of power. But never did Prigozhin claim that he sought to seize power. His outburst was more like a heavily armed temper tantrum by a wealthy, unbalanced man used to getting his way. He was enraged because he was convinced that Russian generals’ continuing failures in Ukraine were physically annihilating and smearing his global business interests, including the 10,000 hardened fighters he has employed to pillage precious natural resources from Africa and Latin America.

Putin let his former enforcer leave the country just hours after publicly threatening him with death (perhaps preventing the release of any secrets Prigozhin might have in the event of untimely death or imprisonment). Prigozhin is now under the protection and watchful eye of Putin’s vassal, Belarusian ruler Aleksander Lukashenko.

If the 62-year-old can avoid Lukashenko’s minders and bounty hunters looking to cash in on the US rewards for his arrest, he should seek professional assistance. In a series of gruesome videos he has posted online, he has demonstrated wildly unstable, angry and bizarre behaviour. Even the Kremlin distanced itself from a video he vehemently defended, in which a Wagner fighter bludgeoned to death a suspected defector.

Some people with anger management challenges punch holes into walls or, better yet, learn to breathe deeply and count to 10. Prigozhin, on the other hand, led contingents of his heavily armed mercenaries into a murky battle in a country with the world’s largest stockpile of atomic weapons, the fourth largest network of nuclear reactors, and several secretive laboratories suspected of conducting dual-use biological experiments, according to some experts.

The fact that Putin elevated the crude, violent former restaurateur Prigozhin to the status of a national figure and placed his allegedly criminal organisation at the core of Russian foreign policy shows the rot at the heart of such personality-based autocracies, which many people mistakenly believe are more efficient and decisive than democracy.

Instead of a system of checks and balances among civil servants and elected officials with even modest levels of expertise and dedication to the public, Putin sits at the head of the table before fearful acolytes, at least some of whom he recruited from his days as a powerbroker among rising plunderers in the immediate post-Soviet years.

Personality has completely replaced the process over the decades. The boss issues orders to be carried out. He is not looking for criticism. There is no genuine weighing of advantages and disadvantages. Cross the tyrant, and you will be banished like Prigozhin, imprisoned like oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in the gulag for speaking out against corruption, or murdered like airline executive Nikolai Glushkov, who was part of a trio of former Russian insiders who turned against Putin.

Worse, strongman rule frequently results in doom rather than decisiveness or efficiency. It has meant the start of a disastrous war in Putin’s Russia, as well as deep, long-lasting scars on the entire Slavic world.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s unchecked one-man rule in Turkey has left the country’s economy such a shambles that even changing course and following the advice of leading economists is insufficient to reassure investors. In India, prime minister Narendra Modi’s drift toward chauvinistic autocracy has hurt the country’s democratic reputation while dangerously exacerbating the Hindi-Muslim divide. In China, Hungary, the Philippines, Israel, and elsewhere, the contemporary strongman’s seemingly obligatory embrace of corrupt crony capitalism worsens inequality, discourages investment in innovation, and encourages elites to migrate.

The truth is that autocracy frequently fails. Scholars Dan Reiter and Allan C Stam found in a landmark study published as a book 20 years ago that over a period of 170 years spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, democracies won 76 per cent of the wars they fought and 93 per cent of the wars they launched, while authoritarian governments only won 46 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, the rigours of the democratic process, as well as leaders’ accountability to voters, lead to better decisions, even in times of crisis.