Although in the period 2008-2012 the president of Russia was Dmitry Medvedev, when Putin temporarily had to be prime minister, the current Russian president, who has been pulling the strings in the country for 25 years, has never allowed anyone else to be number one.
It has been like this since August 9, 1999, when the then head of state Boris Yeltsin first appointed him prime minister. Just a few months later, on December 31 of the same year, Putin succeeded him as president. In all the years since then, Western politicians, such as Angela Merkel, have come and gone. And Putin stayed.
Building the "strongest personal dictatorship"
Over these 25 years, the Russian president has turned his country into "the strongest personalized (personal) dictatorship in the world", as Russian political scientist Mikhail Komin says. "Russia is of course not North Korea – it is simply too big. But the attitude towards citizens is the same, and the state demands more and more loyalty from them.“
As Komin pointed out to DW, this became possible because during his rule Putin has consistently weakened all of Russia's political institutions. "His goal from the very beginning was to reorganize democracy in his favor. And today all power in the Russian state is concentrated in the hands of a single person – Vladimir Putin.“
Control over the regions as a basis of power
It all started with the elimination of “regional autonomy“, Komin recalls. He explains that one of the important political reforms in Putin's first term was the establishment of the so-called. representatives of the president in the regions – they were supposed to control regional policy. It was in this way that the Kremlin created its own instrument of control in the regions – a basis for cementing power, Komin is convinced.
The same opinion is shared by Grigory Nizhnikov, a Russian political scientist living in Finland. “When we remember Russia from the time of early Putin, we also remember the many autonomous centers of power – both constitutional and informal, such as the oligarchs. All of them formed a counterweight to the Kremlin.“ Putin destroyed all this, centralized everything and subordinated the power system of Russia, Nizhnikov told DW.
However, this is not the only reason for the long rule of the Russian president, the expert believes. Because over the past 25 years there have been enough events that could be dangerous for Putin. Among them, according to Nizhnikov, are the protests in Moscow after the parliamentary elections in 2011; the threat of instability in Crimea after its annexation in 2014; the unrest after the controversial pension reform in 2018; the mass protests across Russia, inspired by Navalny, in the following years; the beginning of the war in Ukraine, accompanied by street protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
However, any resistance from the population was followed by even more severe repressions, and today there is no one who can stand up to Putin, Nizhnikov points out.
Controlling the courts and cracking down on the opposition
Another important factor in Putin's preservation of power is the deliberate weakening of the courts during his second term, notes Mikhail Komin. Judges loyal to the ruler were given more power than their other colleagues. “It even got to the point that former court clerks were given the chance to become judges. And so the courts lost their independence.“
Added to this are the changes in the electoral system in favor of Putin and his party “United Russia“. "The ruling party now dominates thanks to the system of suppressing the opposition, and not thanks to the social issues that played a role during Putin's first two terms," the expert says.
Instead of asserting himself against the democratic opposition, Putin has created a kind of shadow cabinet around himself, according to Russian sociologist Alexander Bikbov. In this narrow circle, the president gathered people who shared his specific business interests. Their companies received large state orders and thus enriched themselves, Bikbov points out.
The manipulation of collective historical memory
At the same time, an image of Russia was imposed on society, according to which the state throughout its history has played an exclusively positive role. Everything negative was excluded, all conflicts from the past were erased, says Bikbov. He calls this "manipulation of collective historical memory," which also leads to the strengthening of Putin's power.
In this view, Russia is presented as a society with traditional values - a society in which conflict with the authorities is rejected and unconditional loyalty to those in power is praised as a given.
All three experts - DW's interlocutors - agree that in the future these trends will only intensify and Putin will stay in power for a long time. "The problem is that there is no alternative candidate, nor is there room for him. The last elections that Putin really won were those of 2004. Everything else was unfair," summarizes Mikhail Komin. According to the expert, Putin will be re-elected after the end of his current term in 2030, and the duration of his rule can only be limited by his physical age.
Grigory Nizhnikov also defines as a disadvantage the fact that Russians do not see an alternative to Putin and are rather afraid of change. He notes that in Russia there has always been a need for a firm hand. "A strong leading figure has always had to make decisions and deal with problems. In extreme cases, Russians can afford to criticize the governors, but not the president, under the motto: "If Putin knew about this, the problem would be solved immediately!". And this is an old Russian tradition.