Russia will not disappear if Putin is out

Russian President Vladimir Putin will almost certainly not be in power three years from now. The war he foolishly began in Ukraine has fatally undermined his political credibility among the Russian elite (and among a large though mostly silent part of the population).

One way or another, he will be replaced. He may even save everybody the trouble by dying before he can be removed. He definitely doesn’t look well, and rumours that he is suffering from some terminal disease abound.

Russia is not a fascist state, just a kleptocracy where thieves and thugs have taken power, but Putin’s personal behaviour does begin to resemble Hitler in his bunker in the final days, and Hitler too was very ill.

Putin knows nothing about military matters, but he is reportedly micromanaging single ‘‘battalion combat groups’’ (about 1000 men) in the stalled Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine, trying to retrieve a military situation that has sunk into stalemate.

Very Hitlerian. So what will become of Russia when he goes?

Alexander JMotyl, a political scientist at Rutgers University, thinks it may just disappear. In an opinion piece for The Hill, the leading political website in Washington, DC, he suggests ‘‘the Russian Federation could metamorphose into 10 or more states, only one of which would be known as Russia. That would change the face of Eurasia forever.’’

It certainly would, but it does imply the demise of a state that has dominated northern Eurasia for the past four centuries (the first Russians reached the Pacific in 1647). It also ignores the homogeneity of that state’s population: 81% are ethnically Russian, while none of the many minority groups reaches 4%.

There have been occasions, most recently during the civilwar of 1917-22, when Russia was temporarily carved up into rival jurisdictions, but these interludes have never lasted long. The sense that there is a special Russian identity always reasserts itself.

The break-up of the Soviet Union, by contrast, was permanent. The collapse of 1991 was the last phase of the decolonisation process that ended all the European empires during the latter half of the 20th century.

Decolonisation came late to the Russian Empire and was harder to recognise, because its imperial possessions were around its own land borders rather than across the oceans. Nevertheless, it was the same process and just as irreversible (as Putin is discovering).

Russia is as unlikely to split up permanently as France or Japan. Motyl’s speculations on its break-up are wishful thinking, possibly motivated by the fact that both his parents were born in Ukraine.

So what will happen when Putin goes? We cannot know yet what a genuinely postCommunist Russia would look like.

Although it’s 31 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost all the people in senior political positions began their careers in the Communist Party. The ideology was dumped, but the administrative style and the factional struggles remain.

Moreover, one single man, Vladimir Putin, has dominated Russian politics for more than two-thirds of that time.

The default position is to say that the Russians are somehow fundamentally different from other Slavs. But therewere two big differences that had nothing to do with ‘‘national character’’, whatever that is.

Onewas that all the former ‘‘satellite countries’’ of Eastern Europe immediately ditched their local Communist collaborators, whereas Russiawas essentially stuck with the old Commieswearing new hats.

The other was that the western Slavs experienced the change as liberation, whereas their former rulers saw it as a loss of empire that stranded tens of millions of Russians in places that were suddenly foreign countries.

It would have been unreasonable to expect these two sets of people to react in the same way, and sure enough they didn’t.

But it’s equally unreasonable to be convinced that Russians will behave in the same ways when the ex-Communist ruling elite loses power (whichmay be imminent). We have no idea what’s coming out of the box then. It could even be something good.