Personalism

This is a good piece about how the invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the extent to which Russia has become a personalist dictatorship, with combined with years pandemic isolation is bad news for everyone involved:

Americans tend to see the world in much the same way as President Joe Biden frames it in his speeches, divided neatly between “democracies” and “autocracies.” But the reality is that authoritarian states exist on a political spectrum depending on how much power is exercised by a single individual—and where states land on this spectrum has a big impact on matters of war and peace. At one end, you have civilian-run regimes, like Hu Jintao’s China or Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where political power is checked and shared within a ruling party. At the other, you have personalist dictatorships like that of, say, Saddam Hussein, where rivals are purged, loyalists are rewarded, cults of personality flourish, and all authority runs through the glorious leader.

The political science literature suggests that personalist dictatorships are more erratic and dangerous to the outside world than other sorts of autocracies.

Researchers have found they are more likely to start wars, for instance (institutionalized civilian-run regimes are about as apt to use force as democracies), and also tend to perform worse militarily (not surprising, since their leaders are often surrounded by yes men). But while civilian-run regimes might be less apt to launch destructive, harebrained conflicts in the short term, in the long term they can still be ticking time bombs.

[…]

But the world is now realizing that the Putin regime is really just Vladimir Putin. And he is apparently no longer worried about what war will mean for Russia’s rich, much less its masses.

[…]

But how did so many miss that Putin and his rule had changed? Part of the answer is that Putin has been in power so long that much analysis simply got frozen in the past. Impressions about a Russia dominated by “oligarchs” froze into legend and did not keep up with their effective liquidation as a class. (It didn’t help that Westerns know plenty of Russian billionaires from the Davos circuit, but don’t know the security officials who’ve increasingly embraced the sort of religious nationalism that seems to have gripped Putin.)

The pandemic also made it difficult for outsiders to notice Putin’s apparent descent into paranoid isolation; he has apparently cloistered himself for the past few years through ultra-strict personal lockdowns and social distancing measures that may have affected his judgment. The absurdly long tables Putin has sat at for meetings have become a symbol of his remoteness (and a pretty good meme). French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly found him a completely “different person” in early February from the man he last met in 2019.

This is a very, very grim situation, and countless people in Russia as well as Ukraine will be victims.

In 2007, the political theorist Stephen Holmes wrote an excellent book about how the lack of transparency and accountability and highly centralized decision-making claimed would improve foreign policy responses produced the exact opposite result. This is an even more extreme example — it’s not clear who else in Russia actually wants a war of occupation and conquest in Ukraine, but when only one person has any real power it doesn’t matter.