Imagine you are an authoritarian dictator who is afraid. Afraid not only of political competition or a small opposition, but of many other things as well. You are afraid of your own people—because regardless of being a dictator, in the back of your mind lurks the understanding that a dissatisfied populace could simply “blow you away.” Not like in elections, but through a revolution of the masses, whose side could quickly be taken by all sorts of sycophants who usually just obediently nod along. Therefore, you are afraid of them too, for you never know who is “truly” committed to the cause and will be loyal to you for life, and who will exploit the first sign of weakness to replace you. The recipe for dealing with them is clear—they must be removed, eliminated preliminarily. One must act preventively.
You are afraid of external enemies, both overt and perhaps even more so those who are treacherously underhanded; the former would openly want to remove you from power (even if you merely obediently serve your own people!), while the latter would stab you in the back at the most inopportune moment. Therefore, strategic alliances are almost pointless. Occasionally, only tactical external help counts, and above all, the realization that you must rely exclusively on your own forces. Your strength will be the nation—and above all, this same authoritarian power that serves only the people. Power = the people. And what are the people, if not the simple working class, the farmers, perhaps some bureaucrats, and of course, the army?
You are equally afraid of various intellectuals, artists, writers, journalists, and professors. They are constantly asking uncomfortable questions. They are constantly demanding something, criticizing, and publicly playing smart. And this weakens the regime. Therefore, they must be silenced. At first in a softer way (for we are no longer in the barbaric Middle Ages!), but if that fails, then in a rougher, crueler, and more primitive way—meaning, physical elimination.
But much to your chagrin, this struggle is never over—the utopian paradise that would allow you to relax and be less afraid never arrives. For as soon as you eliminate one set of enemies—both internal and external—new ones sooner or later appear. And after them, new ones again, and again new ones. And because you serve the people, you are obliged to serve for a long time—for this is the only thing expected of you. And so you serve for 10, 20… years. During these years, new generations of enemies grow up, constantly threatening your power and with it the sovereignty of the nation you are duty-bound to protect. That is why you are constantly afraid, day after day, month after month, year after year. But because an immanent characteristic of fear is, among other things, that it paralyzes, you no longer believe anyone, not even yourself. You are afraid of making decisions, for upon what data or information can you base your decisions if everyone around you is a (potential) enemy? You are left to your own paranoia.
And last but not least, you are afraid of the future. The future is by definition undefined, and you fear undefinedness, the possibility of multiple scenarios. The future does not exist, let alone a bright one. There is only this moment, which is the central source of building an authoritarian utopia of artificial eternity (of the regime). With this, your timeframe becomes limited exclusively to the present, to a constantly repeating “today.” Like in that famous nineties movie, “Groundhog Day.” But because time marches linearly forward with or without you, your “today” is actually yesterday, it is a constant past. In the form of past, obsolete battles, solutions, and circumstances. To which you constantly retreat, seeking at least a little safe haven from fear, from the indefinable future. Consequently, it is difficult to offer your subjects a bright future, hope, and some kind of development plan, as you are constantly returning to the past. Even when you speak of the future, you are actually thinking of the past. The circle is, of course, vicious. For with this, your subjects—gradually—see that you are literally stealing their future. And they begin to express dissatisfaction, ask questions, and thus threaten the regime—that is, the people. The solution is, of course, obvious: more and more repression, even more preventive, aggressive action, because the enemy truly never sleeps. And neither does your fear.
There are testimonies that Stalin, upon learning of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, retreated to a remote dacha for several days and was completely cut off from the outside world; he was completely paralyzed, in shock. No, there were no heroic decisions, meetings, or consultations. He was scared to death. A few years later, already after the Second World War, in one of the less formal conversations with his remaining revolutionary comrades, he allegedly admitted that he “trusts no one, not even himself.”
And so we come to Putin. The leap is, of course, not accidental, as the two share the same institutional DNA; paranoia is not just Putin’s personal trait, but his only true “operating system.” But the paradox is that for this same Putin, a myth prevails, which is particularly relevant both within Russian propaganda and part of Western (“intellectual” and political) thought: that he is a strong leader, a statesman. For decades, the West has misinterpreted his fear and paranoia as supreme strategic planning and “chess genius.” You know, the strongman. The one who yields neither to domestic terrorists (read: Chechnya) nor to Western imperialism in the form of American and NATO military interventionism. The one who will be a key, indispensable component of the anti-Western, anti-capitalist axis of resistance, which will offer the world or at least the Global South a better, friendlier economic-political model. It probably sounds familiar. But the truth about Vladimir Vladimirovich, the soon-to-be 74-year-old Russian autocrat, could not be more diametrically opposed.
Putin is weak. Politically, he is “dead.” Not only tomorrow, but already today, which, in accordance with the previously described understanding of the future, means he was already dead “yesterday.” And this is not just since February 2022, when he opted for total war against Ukraine, but at least since 2011/2012, when he ran for president again (for the third time), but had nothing left to offer Russians. Except for a proven, yet obsolete concept, upon which he himself vegetates, along with 100 million or more Russians: back to the Soviet Union. Which, to be fair, everyone feared, as it had the largest nuclear arsenal and the victorious Red Army. True, it had an impoverished population with no food and was dependent on grain imports in the eighties (any similarities with today’s times, when Russia is forced to import gasoline, are naturally purely coincidental, sic!), but everyone was indeed afraid of it.
Just how real his fear of his own “sycophants” is was definitively laid bare by Yevgeny Prigozhin with his mutiny and march on Moscow in the summer of 2023. At that time, Putin, entirely in Stalinist fashion at the outbreak of the war, was paralyzed and simply disappeared from the public eye for a while. And this internal, crippling fear of everyone and anyone even has its own physical, absurd monument: that famous, infinitely long ten-meter table, across which Putin “held” both foreign statesmen and his own generals far away from him. And this fear is actually the only point of Putin’s “program,” which he is selling to Russians with ever-diminishing success.
Putin is afraid, which is why he acts aggressively. Because he is—like a true authoritarian dictator—also afraid of the future, he uses the only methods he knows in his preventive actions: those from the past. That is why he invokes the period of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is why he fights the internet with methods from the era of the fight against samizdat and the independent press; the recipe is simple—abolish everything. It is no surprise that Putin, paralyzed by fear, cannot find answers to the numerous challenges he brought upon himself: he can find no way out of the war, out of economic stagnation, out of international isolation, out of the internal problems of the state that pile up week after week. Because he has no solutions, he waits, hoping they might somehow resolve themselves. And if they do not, he resorts to the methods of the past. When the Kursk submarine sank with 118 crew members in 2000, Putin did not order an international rescue operation. He preferred to let the sailors die. Then, when asked what had happened to the Kursk, he cynically replied: “It sank.” Today, it is no different: while the inhabitants of the “energy superpower” wait in line for hours and days with jerrycans for gasoline, he describes the situation as “not really critical.”
And so, paralyzed by fear, he floats with the current toward an eternity that he probably suspects will never come. But he simply must try, because he has no other choice. His danger today lies not in military might or strategic genius, but in sheer desperation; any retreat would mean weakness, and weakness means an immediate end. Therefore, he is left with no choice but to escalate repression at home and aggression abroad. For enemies never sleep. And so, for a dictator who ran out of future a long time ago, every day is just another “Groundhog Day.”