There are also no signs of revolution in the ranks of officialdom. Though fairly large-scale purges are taking place across various agencies and regional administrations, we do not see the “old guard” being replaced by any new, younger cohort. Over four years of war, not a single individual has emerged who has made a [political] career on the back of the war.

There is not a single popular military commander. As soon as someone approaches that status, something happens to him: he dies in a plane crash, he is sent to Africa, he ends up in prison. In short, it is all very much in the spirit of And Then There Were None.

This frame is important to keep in mind, because the changes of the past four years appear so radical that both experts and ordinary observers fail to notice the elements of the system that remain intact – their attention is drawn to what has changed. This is natural and inevitable. Political science, however, studies everything that transforms: the moving elements of the system are our subject. But to understand what is moving, we must also account for what is not – otherwise we risk getting lost in a chaotic stream of apparent changes.

In fact, this is precisely what makes the current situation interesting: a political system that is seeking stability and self-preservation is radicalizing in its statism (okhranitel’stvo) and [actually] producing chaos and destroying itself. This is striking, though not unprecedented. Historiography has the concept of “long reign” – its final stages are often marked by increasing rigidity, anxiety and a form of revanchist political radicalization. The end of long reigns typically looks like this, characterized by a peculiar combination of conservatism and radicalism.

— According to polling data, nearly three quarters of Russians (73%) say they feel “fatigue from the military campaign.” War fatigue is not new. The question is whether there will be a transition from quantity to quality – whether this fatigue will lead to developments that are problematic for the regime. You do not believe in [the possibility of] protests. But could something else emerge?

— Yes, since mid-2025 we have seen a stable and growing majority that wants the war to end as soon as possible and is becoming increasingly indifferent to the terms on which it ends. I would draw your attention to the latest wave of research by the Chronicles research project. They use perhaps the most radical formulation of the question about attitudes toward ending the war: “If Vladimir Putin decides to withdraw troops from the territory of Ukraine without achieving the originally stated goals of the special military operation, will you support such a decision or not?” In October 2025, 42% of respondents said “yes” and 35% “no.” Previously, Chronicles had asked about “ending hostilities without achieving the originally stated goals of the special military operation.” In September 2024, 50% supported ending hostilities without waiting for these goals to be achieved, while 31% opposed that.

“War fatigue” is not a particularly expressive term. It is not that people are tired of the war as such while everything else is going well. Rather, people’s lives are getting worse, and there are no visible prospects for an improvement. For some, the link between this negative dynamic and the war is clear, for others it is not, but a wide range of people are experiencing a mix of anxiety and despondency.

My working hypothesis, which I test against various data, is that a new majority could now be forming, one that will replace the Putin majority once conceptualized by Gleb Pavlovsky. A majority, as we know, does not know itself and cannot know itself. When it is told that it exists, it begins to exist and then becomes a political factor – an idea that takes hold of the masses becomes a material force.

This new majority may consist of those who dislike and are alarmed by the current situation. The point is not even whether the situation itself is objectively intolerable. Sure, people on the whole live better than they did 20 years ago. But they do not compare their lives to the beginning of the century; they compare them to the very recent past. What matters is not the static level but the dynamic trend. The defining feature of the current situation is that people are losing what they had – services, opportunities and comfort – without receiving anything in return.

People find the loss of what they already have more painful than the failure to obtain what they desire. This, incidentally, is why the 2018 pension reform was so unpopular: people were deprived of something they had; their situation was made worse and nothing was offered in compensation. As Machiavelli taught, a ruler must not encroach on the property, honor or women of his subjects, and if he must take something from them, it is better to kill than to leave behind aggrieved subjects who will never forget the offense and will wait for an opportunity to settle scores.

— This new majority – what is it for or against?

Possibly for stability, for the return of stability or for the end of instability. Take the unfortunate [recently confined pro-Putin blogger] Ilya Remeslo, who for entirely unclear reasons suddenly began saying out loud what everyone thinks. Note that his list of complaints about Putin fully coincides with what until recently was the prerogative – or misfortune – of the liberal urban class. Now, the sense that “life cannot go on like this and things will only get worse” is spreading to ever broader segments of the population.

The idea that in the absence of mechanisms for converting public discontent into political action, the discontent will dissipate on its own without producing any political consequences is not without merit. The Putin regime has resources and adapts; it can outlast many things. If Putin has taught us anything over the years, it is that with sufficient resources and in the absence of an immediate physical threat, almost anything can be outlasted. If no one is literally pulling you off your chair right now, you can act according to the [Russian] proverb that “while the fat man dries out, the thin man dies out,” and then perhaps something will turn in your favor.

However, what Engels, interpreting Hegel, called the “transition from quantity to quality” in our case means the accumulation of errors to a point where the system can no longer process decisions – it becomes clogged with noise. The well-known black box model of a political system assumes that the box takes in demands from the external sociopolitical environment and transforms them into decisions.
Those decisions, returning to the same environment, generate a reaction, and that reaction forms a new demand… For the system, the key point is that any demand from society must go to it, rather than somewhere else. For example, to state institutions rather than to criminal groups or ethnic organizations; to your own state rather than to a foreign one. Or, say, filing a complaint with the police rather than settling matters yourself. This is precisely the governance dysfunction we are discussing. The Russian system has not yet reached this stage, but it is moving in that direction.

— Let’s also look at the near-term outlook. This year, Russia is set to hold major elections: the Duma, 39 regional legislatures, the head of one region and so on. The “new territories” [in Ukraine] will vote for the first time. Should elections still be regarded as something meaningful for the Russian political system today, or are they simply an old, dull ritual?

— On the one hand, authoritarian elections are a well-rehearsed ritual designed to validate the KPIs that have been assigned to each party and region. On the other hand, despite the development of electronic voting, which in principle allows elections to be conducted without voters, it is not yet possible to dispense entirely with real people. Moreover, the election period remains one of the rare times when it is possible to gather in groups larger than three without immediately being beaten for it… Though it is worth recalling that ahead of the 2019 elections in Moscow, people were beaten in the streets simply for gathering. Nevertheless, there are more opportunities than at any other time.

There is another noteworthy aspect of the upcoming electoral campaign. According to polling, the New People party is dangerously close to coming in second place. The original intent of [Kremlin] political strategists was to use New People to punish the Communists for their past protest activity and their flirtations with Navalny supporters – knock the KPRF out of the second place it had occupied throughout the entire Putin post-Soviet period to third, and elevate the LDPR to second place. Why the LDPR? Because A Just Russia cannot be elevated anywhere – it is a party in visible decline.

However, it appears that both due to the idiosyncrasies of the new LDPR leadership after Zhirinovsky, and as a result of the unpopular decisions discussed earlier, the weakening of the Communists is instead benefiting New People. This is because the latter advocate a free internet, which is the most clearly articulated demand of urban Russia. People also want the war to end, but that cannot be discussed openly, whereas complaining about connectivity still can.

Does any of this pose a threat to the stability of the political system? No. But it is an interesting development that reflects the situation in the country. We will see how the political section of the Presidential Administration handles it. Perhaps it will not handle it at all and will instead elevate New People to second place, using the elections to reduce social tension.

Voting remains, for now, one of the few ways Russians can express dissatisfaction with the government without punishment. After all, not voting for United Russia is not as risky as not voting for Putin – the party is not quite as sacrosanct.
We have discussed how modern autocracies benefit from elements of a partially market-based economy. They also benefit from imitative democratic mechanisms. Even simulated elections allow the system to carry out a certain degree of fine-tuning. We will see what comes of it.