For some reason, everyone believes that sane people around Putin - Moscow Mayor Sobyanin, Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff Krainko and others - do not go against the president, because even though they understand that he has become a nightmare for the country, they are afraid.
True, they are afraid.
However, they are not afraid of Putin.
They are afraid of what they will have to do when Putin is finally ousted.
And what they will have to do is to withdraw the forces from Ukraine, stop funding the defense industry and open difficult negotiations regarding the partial lifting of the sanctions in exchange for financing the reconstruction of Ukraine.
And they will not only have to release political prisoners - apart from that there will be no political stability, but also arrest those who demand to continue the war.
Because even without it there will be no political stability.
Nobody wants to be the messenger
All of these measures would be decidedly unpopular.
The issue is not even in the Putin propaganda that turned the citizens of Russia into zombies: we all saw in 1989-1991 how the effect of the propaganda expired when the sources of "radiation" were cut off.
The thing is that the people of Russia do not understand that everything is very bad.
It won't be bad, but bad already.
Tens of thousands of soldiers are already dead and wounded;
Billions of rubles have already been burned;
The GDP has already fallen (according to official data - by 5%, which is a lot for a crisis that amounts to a shot in the foot); hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves and assets have already gone down the drain. Only the Russians don't know about it.
Whoever comes after Putin will be required to tell the veterans of the war about the shrinking of allowances, and the owners of the factories of the defense industry - that there will be no more orders.
That is, from the moment the heir starts doing something to get out of the hole, interest groups with great power and vigor will act against him.
The Russians still don't know: the networks are full of comments showing that they don't even realize how dire their situation is.
As they did not imagine in 1985 and even in 1990, that everything is already over.
Just as conservative senior officials in the Communist Party once pushed the USSR to pay more for the Jews, so now their followers in Moscow imagine that there will be a "recruitment" and then everything will be over a few months later.
That is why Putin's potential successors are in no rush now.
Each of them wants someone else to become a messenger, to deliver the bad news to the people of Russia and lose any chance of popularity.
It is so transparent that it seems that those who will come after Putin will still try to pretend that "business as usual".
They will start secret talks to lift the sanctions and hint to the West that the forces are withdrawing.
They will try to reduce the budget, without firing military personnel, and of course they will continue to lie that "everything is working according to plan".
Because telling the Russians exactly what the 20 years of Putin's rule and the war brought about, and what it will take to restore the country after Putin - all this is scarier than conspiring against him.
The writer is an economist from Moscow, today a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago
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