"Putinland" as a "mafia state": Navalny confidante explains Russia's "madness" - and three scenarios for Putin's end

Created: 04/10/2022 17:36

By: Florian Naumann

When will Vladimir Putin leave the stage?

The opposition leader Leonid Volkov wishes him a “long life” – and a palace revolt.

© IMAGO/Grigory Sysoev

Leonid Volkov is a confidante of Alexei Navalny and an expert on Russian politics.

In a new book, he sheds light on the background of the Putin system.

IPPEN.MEDIA read it in advance.

Munich – Russia.

A country that is sometimes not that far away – to which every inhabitant of Europe probably has associations and gut feelings.

However, very few people in Central Europe have real knowledge and real understanding of the largest country on earth.

Perhaps that's why the shock was so great when Vladimir Putin's troops invaded Ukraine on February 24.

Or not: Leonid Volkov, who became known as the campaign manager and confidant of Alexei Navalny, can definitely be considered an expert on the Putin system.

But at the end of February 2022, he too was flabbergasted - he describes this impressively in his new book "Putinland", written in German.

In addition to the emergence and function of the Russian repressive and "mafia state".

After all, Volkov also provides three scenarios of a possible end of “Putinism” in his work.

This is instructive for German readers.

And a journey through hope and fear: Volkov not only writes from the perspective of a long-time resident of Russia, but undoubtedly from that of the opposition.

It is a journey into the descending darkness of a dictatorship - but also a story of as many rude awakenings and misjudgments as smaller and larger opposition successes.

So it almost sounds like a prayer when Volkov writes about the hope for a very specific form of Putin's failure.

Whether it will come true this time is an open question.

Volkow 's book was read

by

before it was published on October 4th.

"Putin is no idiot": Navalny confidant Volkov is looking for the reason for the Ukraine war

Leonid Volkov, he writes, witnessed February 24 at a conference of Russian opposition figures in the United States.

There will be no war, he explained to everyone who asked him: "Putin is no idiot!" There were no good reasons for the invasion: Volodymyr Zelenskyy's poll numbers were in the basement, a public no by NATO to one The admission of Ukraine would have been easy to negotiate and could have been the political death knell for the president whom Putin hates, Volkov judges.

The west was getting closer again, Nord Stream 2 was about to go into operation.

But then things turned out differently:

Due to the time difference, the news about the first attacks burst into the event.

"I was standing there on the podium in this huge hall and I felt like a total idiot," Volkov recalls.

But, he says, Putin made the biggest mistake of his political career.

The step may have seemed "rational" to Putin - but only because he lives in a closed world in which Kremlin narratives influence public opinion and embellished secret service reports the Kremlin boss's specifications.

Russia's Soviet nostalgia: Navalny confidante explains a key basis of Putin's power

A question that German observers ask themselves about Vladimir Putin's very own world could also be: Why always the reference to the Soviet Union, that repressive giant empire that was run down towards the end and that Putin would love to restore, at least in its outer borders?

From the point of view of the native Russian, Volkov explains it like this: With the end of the Soviet Union, not only a political, but also an economic lifeworld collapsed for the Russians.

Two phenomena appearing as one.

With a loud bang, "as a phase of economic chaos that threatens our very existence, as well as political uncertainty."

Leonid Volkov is asked to explain - here after the award of the Sakharov Prize to Alexei Navalny in the European Parliament.

© Dwi Anoraganingrum/www.imago-images.de

At the same time, the West did not forge a marshal plan, but left Russia to its own devices: "Like the Germans after their defeat in World War I in 1918, people felt innocently offended and treated unfairly." This is the keyboard that Putin plays, explains Volkov in his book - in which he used the "wild nineties" as a foil for horror.

Just like on Friday with the big staged annexation speech again.

The head of the Kremlin deliberately equates the Russian democracy and economic chaos that flared up briefly at the time: "Democracy is a catastrophe, democracy means poverty".

The assertion of stability, on the other hand, is the basis of Putin's popularity.

Putin as a small light - that crosses the last borders: "We were wrong"

Volkov describes the period since Putin took office in 2000 as a sometimes continuous, sometimes jerky trajectory into repression.

Putin, in Volkov's words "a little light", has "sometimes compulsively" implemented the "lessons" he has learned: From the failure of his charismatic former boss Anatoly Sobchak in a St. Petersburg mayoral election, he has learned that elections are always dangerous.

So he makes political activity impossible.

Through his own leap from no-name to president, sponsored by television, how important media control is.

So Putin put the TV in line.

Volkov devotes a separate chapter to the functioning and limits of the propaganda machine.

By drying up tax sources in Russian regions, Putin also broke the federal character of the Russian political system.

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The majority of this, according to Volkov, happened before 2004. And yet, according to his own statements, he still experienced a nasty surprise in 2007: Dmitry Medvedev and Putin, who were considered liberal at the time, resigned from office, which brought Putin back to the presidency.

More unexpected blows were to follow.

Even after election rigging, alleged sham proceedings against Navalny's team, secret service murders and increasingly harsh penalties for demonstrators (for whom Volkov, by the way, sees Belarus as a test laboratory and Putin as "Alexander Lukashenko's little brother"):

What is meant is the poisoning of Navalny in 2018. “We had assumed that Putin would make a strict distinction between the world of the political stage, where the law is at least apparently followed, and the hidden world of the secret services and agents, who have their own rules. "We were wrong," says Volkov.

Putin's Russia as a "mafia state": A fragile symbiosis around the Kremlin?

In retrospect, he classifies the attack with the neurotoxin Novichok as a logical intermediate step before the Ukraine war in two senses.

On the one hand, before the invasion, Putin wanted to eliminate every “fifth column” from the country.

On the other hand, with this border crossing, war has also become “inevitable”.

He was "sure" that there were also thoughts in the Kremlin about "integrating the opposition movement, which was growing stronger in some places, into legal structures".

But Putin decided otherwise.

And marched against totalitarianism in seven-league boots.

Volkov's view of how the Putin system works is also enlightening, and in any case exciting.

The "godfather" in the state is Putin.

Around him there are “lieutenants”, each with their own area of ​​responsibility.

From Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to Gazprom boss Alexei Miller.

All of these are involved in symbioses.

For example, billionaire Oleg Deripaska financed the luxury of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

But as soon as everyone no longer benefits from Putin and not everyone from each other under pressure from Putin, the system is bound to collapse.

"A mafia is not immortal," says Volkov.

He sees an example in the failed partial withdrawal of the Kazakh despot Nursultan Nazarbayev.

One of Volkov's hopes rests precisely on the fragility of this power construct.

Another on an invisible mass of critically minded Russians: behind everyone who protests despite great dangers there is an exponential number of silent sympathizers.

Despite the great risks, there were still as many protests in 2022 as years ago in almost "free" times.

A third pillar of his optimism is Russia's anchoring in Europe: Opinion polls show that Putin's incitement against the United States is working, writes Volkov.

The sympathy for products from Europe, for example, cannot be killed.

There is a sense of belonging and a personal image of the continent gained through travel.

Asia, on the other hand, which Putin has declared he wants to align Russia with, is "cultural" for most Russians "terra incognita".

Putin's end: Volkov sees three scenarios - and hopes for a "long life" for Putin

And yet Volkov's outlook on the end of the Putin era actually sounds a little like a prayer not to be wrong again: "I would like to believe - and that would only be fair - that the price for his errors, which his loss of reality is to blame , the collapse of Putinism will be.”

Volkov sees three scenarios for this.

First of all, a "biological" end through Putin's death - although the opposition member does not believe in a serious illness, also in view of the robust health of some of Putin's relatives.

Even more: Volkov hopes that it will not come to that.

The result could be Putin's status as an unfinished hero or "myth," he warns.

Merely returning Crimea could become a political impossibility.

It would be better if the president were to fall: Putin would then be remembered as "the Hitler of the 21st century".

That will facilitate Russia's change, "through denazification, if you will."

No, we must not wish Putin death, on the contrary!

We must wish him a long life, a very long one, so that he will be held accountable for his misdeeds in this life.

Leonid Volkov, "Putinland"

A palace revolt would be more desirable, or a popular uprising, writes Volkov.

Experience has shown that an uprising can also arise from small sparks;

but that is difficult to assess.

The exiled opposition figure is pinning his greatest hopes on a kind of internal mafia war in the Kremlin. The massive sanctions have "thrown the elite into confusion," he says, curtailing their opportunities for self-enrichment.

"If Putin can no longer guarantee his followers that they can steal undisturbed, they in turn will cease to be guarantors of maintaining his power."

Of the three pillars of Putin's power, "loyalty, mutual benefit and fear", only fear remained.

In any case, if Putin falls, there will be a power vacuum, Volkov speculates.

A "war of all against all, in which only one will survive".;

the Putin system does not know of a successor plan.

Then the civil society that has strengthened behind the scenes must be on the spot.

A "painful" awakening of many blinded by the propaganda would follow, says Volkov.

However, it remains to be seen whether and when “Putinland” will actually come to an end.

Many people should hope that Alexei Navalny's confidant is not wrong this time.

Florian Naumann

The book:

“Putinland.

The imperial delusion, the Russian opposition and the delusion of the West” will be published on October 4th by Verlag Droemer HC, EUR 22.