The Hoover Institution’s Stephen Kotkin is probably America’s top Kremlinologist. He knows Russia — its history, culture, and politics — as well or better than any contemporary scholar in the United States. He is in the process of completing the third and final volume of his magisterial biography of Joseph Stalin. And he has written a lengthy essay in Foreign Affairs that plots five likely futures for Russia. Policymakers in the United States, Europe, and Asia should take note.
Kotkin’s essay is about Russia after Putin — what comes next when Putin leaves the scene. Kotkin believes that Putin fancies himself a new tsar, but in reality he has created a “personalistic autocracy” that will likely present Russia with a succession crisis rather than a smooth transition of power. Putin’s mortality and what Kotkin calls “larger structural factors” will contribute to shaping Russia’s future. This is not just a scholarly exercise. Kotkin urges Western leaders to “extrapolate from current trends in a way that can facilitate contingency planning” for post-Putin Russia. He imagines five possible futures for Russia.
At the outset of the essay, Kotkin suggests that Western leaders approach Russia with realism informed by history. The United States and its Western allies, he writes, have hopefully learned that we cannot transform or shape Russia (or China) into liberal democracies. Russia, he notes, is a civilization “that long predat[ed] the founding of the United States” and is a country that cannot be separated from its customs, traditions, culture, and history by well-meaning platitudes about a rules-based international order. The same goes for China. Instead of trying to “shape Russia’s trajectory,” Kotkin writes, U.S. and Western policymakers “should prepare for whatever unfolds.”
He describes Russia as having a “statist and monarchical tradition” that is part of its peoples’ DNA. The late, great Kremlinologist Richard Pipes in his book Russia Under the Old Regime called it “patrimonialism,” which he described as “a regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguishable” and where “political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power.” “In a patrimonial state” like Russia, Pipes explained, “there exist no formal limitations on political authority, nor rule of law, nor individual liberties.” Political life is rooted in the persons of the rulers. The Bolshevik coup d’etat ushered in a police state and eventually Stalinism. Today’s Russia, Kotkin notes, is not Stalinist. Putin, as bad as he is, is not the monster that Stalin was. Kotkin describes Putinism as “an authoritarian, resentful, mystical nationalism grounded in anti-Westernism, espousing nominally traditional values, and borrowing incoherently from Slavophilism, Eurasianism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.”
One possible post-Putin future is Russian retrenchment, which Kotkin believes could be forced upon Putin’s successor as a result of demographics, economics, and a stalemated Ukraine war. A second possible future is Russia as a “vassal” of China in a reversal of roles from the Sino-Soviet bloc of the early 1950s. Kotkin believes that the renewed Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” largely rests on the personal relationship between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping as well as a common interest in undermining the U.S.-led global order. The foundations of the relationship, however, are otherwise “brittle,” according to Kotkin. A third future involves Russia emerging as a “gigantic North Korea … dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing” when it suits Russia’s rulers to do so. Russia, in this scenario, could play the “America card” against China the same way the Nixon administration used the “China card” against Moscow in the early 1970s. Kotkin’s fourth future scenario is a post-Putin Russia in chaos and anarchy that falls victim territorially to a predatory China and even Japan, and where armed criminal groups struggle for power and privilege, including to control nuclear and biological weapons. Kotkin’s final scenario is Russia as a Eurasian great power “operating as a key arbiter of world affairs” with renewed ties to Europe in a multi-polar balance of power.
The United States and the West must prepare for whatever emerges from a post-Putin Russia. “Peace comes through strength, combined with skillful diplomacy,” Kotkin writes. “[T]he rise of a Russian nationalist who acknowledges the long-term price of extreme anti-Westernism,” he continues, “remains the likeliest path to a Russia that finds a stable place in the international order.” He suggests that U.S. diplomats endeavor to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war on terms that both sides can accept, and to pursue what he labels as a “pro-Russian policy” that provides incentives for a post-Putin Russia to a version of detente without forcing Russia to embrace democracy. Until then, Kotkin suggests the possibility (which appears remote at best) of “asking China to help restrain Russia” in the interests of maintaining global peace.
Russia’s future may not neatly fall into any of Kotkin’s scenarios, but U.S. policymakers would do well to consider approaching global geopolitics with a Kotkinesque realism that abandons ideological straitjackets like “democracy vs. autocracy” in favor of order and stability in the service of peace.
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