For an All-Powerful Dictator, Putin Is Surprisingly Vulnerable
A Q&A on the Russian leader’s domestic troubles with Timothy Frye, author of a new book, “Weak Strongman.”
Birds of a feather.
Photographer: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a lot of things to a lot of people. To some he is a modern-day Stalin. To others, the return of the czars. To U.S. President Joe Biden, he is a “killer.” To former U.S. President Barack Obama, he’s “the bored kid at the back of the classroom” — a metaphor my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Leonid Bershidsky runs with: “His defiance, like that of the schoolkid with an attitude, appears to derive strength from the assumption that confronting him is more trouble than it’s worth.”
All these comparisons have one thing in common: power. They describe a man with an iron rule at home and daring to defy his Western rivals abroad. But what if that isn’t really true? All despots have weaknesses; just ask Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Romania’s Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Oh, wait, you can’t — they were all killed. As the political scientist Milan Svolik puts it: “For most dictators, simply dying in bed is a significant accomplishment.”