The West Needs to Think Beyond Vladimir Putin
The U.S. and its allies should woo the next generation of Russians and their post-Soviet neighbors with a vision of cooperation that rectifies the strategic mistakes of the past.
He won’t be sitting there forever.
Photographer: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images
The riots in Kazakhstan that brought down its government on Jan. 5 are just the latest sign of tension under the muddy ice crust into which the core post-Soviet authoritarian regimes have congealed — the same crust that broke in Ukraine in 2014, cracked but held in Belarus in 2020 and grew so thick in Russia last year that it started to look like permafrost.
That’s a deceptive look: The predatory, repressive regimes in these countries are not permanent — not just because they frustrate the ambitions of their smartest subjects, but also because they depend heavily on formerly charismatic personalities that no longer inspire. “Grandfather, Go” is a popular slogan among Kazakhstan protesters; they mean 81-year-old ex-president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who left the formal job to a successor in 2019 but has held on to the levers of power. Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and Vladimir Putin in Russia are “grandfathers,” too. They have held on thanks to a combination of repression and inertia, but their resource is finite.