How long does Putin have left? Combined with rumours of ill-health, Putin’s disastrous military campaign in Ukraine has led many to question how long he will cling to power. According to the Russian-Latvian independent news platform Meduza, ministers and oligarchs alike are unhappy at the scale of sanctions and the slow and uncertain progress of Putin’s ‘special military operation’. Alongside rumours of secret plans for a post-Putin Russia, elite discontent has already fuelled several high-profile resignations, including Boris Bondarev, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law. The ship is beginning to sink, and the rats are beginning to swim.
Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, recently predicted Putin will go by the end of 2023 – albeit into a sanatorium. According to him, a removal on medical grounds could allow the Russian establishment to move Putin on without staging a coup. In turn, he speculated, this could pave the way for his replacement by Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia and a long-time KGB associate of the Russian president. Other horses in this lethal race could include Putin’s former bodyguard and governor of the Tula region, Alexei Dyumin, and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, though Shoigu’s chances are now slim on account of Russia’s military reverses in Ukraine.
If, on the other hand, Russia’s elites manage to avoid replacing Putin with another strongman, they could choose technocratic figures like current Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobynanin, or even ex-president Dmitri Medvedev, whose relative weakness could prove attractive to those wishing to manipulate affairs from behind the scenes.
The ship is beginning to sink, and the rats are beginning to swim.
Alternatively, Russia’s security service, the FSB, could engineer a coup and install a hawk to conduct the war in Ukraine more effectively. This could well lead to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, Dr Rod Thornton of King’s College London warned: ‘They’ll want to send a message in line with the Russian doctrine of Udar, which means ‘massive shock’ in Russian.’ Frying pan contents, meet fire.
There is one more option, though, which few people have yet to consider. What if the Russian tsars were restored to their sovereign office following a peaceful coup? How might geopolitics look today if each year a Romanov read the Tsar’s Speech to the State Duma or Federation Council, echoing the Queen’s Speech in a splendidly orchestrated act of autocracy’s submission to democracy? Might a reconstituted ancien régime encourage a more moderate Kremlin?
It could well be so. Like all unelected figures with fingers in political pies, constitutional monarchs must tread carefully to preserve their legitimacy within wider democratic systems. This contrasts starkly with elected heads of state, to whom ‘democratic’ mandates grant carte blanche to pass their whims into law. Putin takes this to the extreme, using the threat of nuclear apocalypse to commit unbridled atrocities in Ukraine, while simultaneously deploying a clique of kleptocratic oligarchs to help him bend Russia’s vast territory to his will. Against this monstrous backdrop, it seems clear that installing a sovereign who could (like the Queen) ‘advise and warn’ would be a valuable addition not just to Russian affairs but to global politics, too. What then are the prospects of this happening?
For some time, surviving Romanovs have cautiously sought a return to Russian public affairs. With the backing of the Orthodox Church – who famously canonised Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 2000 – they have achieved partial rehabilitation in the heart of their former empire. Nevertheless, Mark Galeotti, writing for The Spectator last year, put the prospects of restoration at slim to zero. Few countries, after all, present more forbidding conditions for reform than Russia. Putin’s kleptocracy is so deeply embedded, so firmly founded on top of generation upon generation of totalitarian immiseration, that it’s hard to envisage the country pivoting smoothly to any form of good governance, including constitutional monarchy. In Russia, autocratic governance has become so automatic that even the possibility of its absence sparks fear of chaos and collapse. Prior to February this year, Putin’s dominance over Russian politics and public life seemed completely unassailable.
But that was then, and this is now. What if Russia loses the war in Ukraine, as looks increasingly possible? Might Russia not then become a great power defeated in combat, rudderless in government, foundering in trade, and isolated in international affairs? Might Russia, that is, begin to look rather like the Weimar Republic? It’s worth recalling Winston Churchill’s remarks on Germany’s chaotic interwar years in The Gathering Storm, in which he argued that the traditional elements of German society which might have sustained a constitutional monarchy – and thereby the fledgling democracy of the Weimar Republic – had been cut loose. Without them, the Republic ‘could not hold the loyalties or the imagination of the German people’ – as events were quite soon to prove in catastrophic style.
Serious military defeat frequently prompts regime change. If Putin falls, or even if he remains in power but drastically weakened, a second and more moderate Russian revolution could certainly take place. And this could present a golden opportunity to fill the leadership vacuum with something more desirable than just another Putin – assuming, of course, that an acceptable regal candidate could be found within the Byzantine intricacies of the depleted Romanov ranks. A Russian restoration would be a revolution in both senses of the word, at once a circling back and a moving forward. Restoring the monarchy would help satisfy Russia’s enduring desire for strong leadership and clear, authentic national identity, while helping to curb the linked tendencies towards militarism abroad and oppression at home. Restoration could also be an opportunity for political reform, for progress towards stronger parliamentary institutions and a more progressive constitution. A weak figurehead requires strong shoulders to hold it aloft.
Perhaps reflecting these possibilities, a 2017 survey found that over a third of Russians aged between 25 and 34 were in favour of restoration, while a 2018 survey found that Russians were more favourably disposed towards Nicholas II, the last tsar, than either Lenin or Stalin. Alexis de Tocqueville thought that, to survive in changing conditions, aristocracy had to imbibe the spirit of democracy. In Russia, it might well be the other way around.
In a police state still cowering under the rule of the FSB, we must recognise that serious reform of this or any other kind is easier said than done. But neither should we underestimate the influence that the Romanovs still wield upon the Russian imagination. ‘It’s very unlikely that Georgy Romanov would play some political role in the future of Russia,’ said the nationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, following the high-profile royal wedding of one tsarist candidate, Grand Duke Georgy Mikhailovich Romanov, in St Petersburg in 2021. ‘But we cannot say never. Never is not Russian.’
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