British scholar Richard Sakwa, on the one hand, and Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, on the other, each depict a Russian political order under Vladimir Putin that reflects considerable strengths and weaknesses. Sakwa argues, in a book completed before the advent of the Ukraine crisis in late 2013, that Putin has not simply presided over the fuels-driven recovery of the Russian economy (2000–2008) and managed a menacing economic and fiscal crisis in 2008–2009 (when the price of oil fell from $145 to $33 per barrel in six months) but has constructed a political order—call it “Putinism”—characterized by “the constant absorption by the political centre of policy, personnel and power in general” (p. 230). All major, and frequently competing, policy constituencies (e.g., economic—though not political—liberals, rent-seeking elites, nationalists, government employees—some 40 percent of all workers—and pensioners) are accommodated in part but none can supplant Putin as the indispensable broker of political and economic power. At the same time, Putin’s political accomplishment, which ensured that the oligarchic capitalism of the 1990s was crushed by state capitalism (p. 39), has resulted in a stalemate between rent-seeking and profit-seeking elites (p. 38), leading to “systemic contradictions that have created a blockage on modernization and a stalemate in politics” (vii).

Events since publication have tended to confirm Sakwa’s analysis. While Putin’s regime (unlike Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s) survived in 2008–2009 a calamitous drop in the price of fuels, the country’s principal source of export revenues (constituting up to half of the national government’s budget), Russian economic performance has not recovered to pre-crisis levels. Indeed, by late 2013, Russian economic growth was heading toward zero while the average price of oil was at an historically high $110 per barrel. The imposition in mid-2014 of sanctions by the United States and the European Union over the Ukraine crisis and the subsequent decline in the oil price by more than 50 percent have reinforced a Russian recession whose roots seem to be systemic rather than conjunctural in nature. If anything, the grip of Russia’s rent-seeking elites has intensified during the regime’s nationalist turn during the Ukraine crisis and the annexation of Crimea, making even less likely the commitment of direct investment capital (Russian and foreign) on the scale needed to replace the country’s mainly Soviet-era economic infrastructure. In this respect, the Putin regime, based on the capture of the state by Putin’s political network, stands at the threshold of “Brezhnevization,” characterized by a crisis of productivity in the economy, a profoundly corrupt nexus of politics and business, and—how different from the Communist Party of China!—the absence of any agreed-upon rules for political succession.

This is not to say that Putin’s regime is in imminent danger: indeed, had Gorbachev not inadvertently undermined the capacity of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to rule, it is plausible that the Soviet system in some form might still be with us. Notably, Putin was scarred personally by the collapse of the Soviet state, and then by the virtual collapse of the Russian state in the 1990s—what he terms the “vacuum of power”—and has dedicated his political career (perhaps too successfully) to ensuring that this did not recur. In this respect, Sakwa posits six “pillars of power” that sustain the Putin political machine, i.e.:

1. 1. capture of the electoral-party system by Putin’s Presidential Administration;

2. 2. co-optation by the regime of key social organizations;

3. 3. alignment of business with regime goals;

4. 4. subordination of regional to central governmental powers;

5. 5. minimization of the chance that civil society could “feed opposition to the regime;” and

6. 6. “dominance over the mass media, above all television” (pp. 26–32).

This last item is the point of departure in Soldatov and Borogan’s analysis of the challenge that the horizontal logic of the Internet poses for the vertical logic of Putin’s regime. Exploiting extensive interviews with regime insiders and opponents, the authors argue that Putin’s government has essentially adapted Soviet models of control over telephonic communications to the challenge of the Internet. The Russian government, spurred by the examples of the “Arab Spring” of 2011, has in recent years worked to subordinate the Internet to its priorities, above all to ensuring that civil society not fuel opposition to the government (Sakwa’s point 5, supra). Soldatov and Borogan argue that, in spite of impressive efforts by Putin’s government to impose its priorities, the centrifugal logic of “Internetworks” has and will continue to assert itself, with powerful political consequences for the regime. The authors relate the undoubted role that creative use of the Internet in various forms played in fueling protests against the falsified Russian parliamentary elections of December 2011 (pp. 123–146); in mobilizing protests against the Yanukovich government in Ukraine (pp. 275–277); and in eluding comprehensive penetration by the Russian state through a series of ingenious technical countermeasures, as well as the sheer scale of Internet communication (pp. 305–309).

At the same time, the authors are keen enough observers to document many impressive successes by Putin’s government in bringing the Internet to heel. These include:

1. a. requiring all Russian banks to employ encryption codes—at their own expense—provided by the government (66);

2. b. inducing all major Russian Internet providers to be connected through an electronic “black box” with the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB (p. 66);

3. c. the employment of “trolls” not formally connected to the government to initiate devastating “denial of service” attacks on domestic and foreign opponents (pp. 116, 260–262);

4. d. official government blocking of opposition news sites (p. 261);

5. e. the legalized establishment of “blacklists” that afford the government carte blanche in blocking Internet communication (263–266);

6. f. requiring that Russians can only store personal data in Russia and that global platforms must locate their servers to Russia if they wish to operate in the country (p. 217); the use of drones to photograph protestors and establish biometric data bases for monitoring dissidents—10 million images can be scanned in 7 seconds (pp. 176–177); etc.

While Soldatov and Borogan stress the liberating possibilities of the Internet, their own analysis shows that the Russian government is no mere passive observer. The Internet per se is compatible with liberal and authoritarian outcomes. The fact that the election protests of 2011–2012 petered out after a combination of selective repression and cooptation; that Putin wields even greater charismatic legitimacy after the annexation of Crimea; that Putin’s United Russia party now controls three-fourths of seats in parliament after the September 2016 Duma elections—all speak to the limits of the Internet as a tool of political opposition faced with a determined authoritarian government that retains its unity of purpose and function.

To give Soldatov and Borogan their due, they conclude as follows: “Putin’s system is effective as long as people are certain the Kremlin is in control . . . . Intimidation is essential in this environment and it sends an unmistakable message: we are watching you, we are in charge, and there is no way to hide from us. But during a crisis of confidence, an upheaval, or an emergency, the dynamic is transformed. In a crisis a tidal wave of content is generated and shared in real time. A single message can be copied by millions, and here the Putin system of control cannot cope. It is built to zero in on a few troublemakers, not millions of average users. In times of instability it is average users who spread the information, and the Putin system then breaks down” (pp. 314–315).

Putin has focused his political energies on building a structure of state power that can retain its unity of command even under conditions of stress. To date, it has survived two major stress tests: the economic crises of 2008–2009 and 2014 to the present. In the process, the Putin regime has proved able to assert a degree of control over mass communications to minimize challenges to its authority. It has also, so far, been able to adapt to the novel challenge of the Internet. At the same time, Putin’s regime is largely a personalistic one, based on a charismatic legitimacy that is to a large extent independent of the specific performance of the government. It has yet to devise a program that can move Russia beyond the confines of a resource-based, rentier political economy and it has yet to institutionalize the issue of political succession. Stagnation and stability coexist, not yet uneasily. For the time being, Putin appears to have framed the path to his reelection, yet again, in 2018 for another six-year term as Russia’s president. Should anything happen to Putin in the meantime and the unity of the Russian elite be shattered in the struggle to succeed him, the capacity of the Internet to reshape relations between state and society might then be revealed in novel form on Russian soil.