The Putin power model is heading into the March 2024 presidential election heavily reliant on two unstable mainstays: passive conformism and fear—the latter amplified by the sudden death of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny a month before the vote. While there is no doubt over the election’s outcome, the presidential campaign is already exposing the myth of complete consolidation around an irreplaceable president. Vladimir Putin may be winning in the short term, but he is strewing mines beneath the country’s future. Apparently resigned to the motto “après nous, le deluge,” 1 the regime is unable to define its goals and is exhausting the long-term supply of political, economic, demographic, and psychological resources. The All-Pervasive State In his novel A Hero of Our Time , the nineteenth-century Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov depicted “the vices of our entire generation” in one man, the story’s (anti)hero. Two years into Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, today’s “hero of our time” is a passive conformist who does not want to see or hear the obvious. To excuse the inexcusable and explain the inexplicable to themselves, ordinary people are adopting the fetal position, 2 abdicating responsibility for everything, and defending themselves from the world with propaganda clichés imposed from above. They declare the archaic and unthinkable to be entirely moral and, indeed, the only possible outcome. In the world of these conformists, there is no collective guilt or even collective responsibility: they cannot influence anything, so they are not guilty of anything. Their position is “this war is unnecessary, but it wasn’t us who started it.” 3
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