Since everyone today is preoccupied with Putin’s health, I simply cannot avoid writing a column about this. Whether he is dead or not—we will know soon enough, and in this column we will talk a bit about what will happen if Putin dies. This is a popular topic, and after all, he will die someday. And if by that time the war is still ongoing, then Putin’s death will obviously affect it in some way.
Here opinions diverge—some say it will be good, while others say nothing will change, since there is a whole country full of such Putins. Of course, history has not only no subjunctive mood, but also no reliable forecast. The future is unknown because the present is unknown and because a person is always in a state of choice, even if it seems to them that there is no choice. There can be no precise forecasts, but we can try to talk about patterns.
So, in the times of my childhood there was a song, and in it were these words: “Lenin is always alive, Lenin is always with you, in grief, hope and joy, Lenin in your destiny, in every happy day, Lenin in you and in me.” Those were innocent times, when no one had yet watched horror movies, and the lines about “Lenin in you and in me” could not be considered dark or funny. For our topic, what matters is that these lines reflect the most important policy of Soviet power—the implantation of Lenin larvae in every “you and me.” This greatly cheapens the tasks of power, because if you have a Lenin larva living inside you, then you can voluntarily go to some Komsomol construction site and it is much easier to send you to some Afghanistan to repay the international debt.
Those who believe that Putin’s death will change nothing are, one way or another, appealing to sacred knowledge about the larvae. They believe that since Russians are mass infected, the death of one Putin changes nothing, because others just like him will come to his place. When reasoning about this, we fall into a vicious circle—power spreads larvae, larvae reproduce power, where here is the beginning and where is the end is impossible to say.
Though, one can recall how things stood in practice. For example, when Brezhnev died, many muttered in corners that “there will be war.” What were these people afraid of, after all, if everyone was affected by the Lenin larvae, there should be no problems?
Probably, it is still correct to say that power infects the people, and the people reproduce power, but all this takes time and each cycle produces different monsters. After all, Russia differed from the USSR and even now differs, and it is not a fact that it was “programmed” for what is happening to it today—there always existed options depending on people’s choices.
In our topic, something else is very important. If we speak in terms of analogies, personal power can be compared to a crystal. It grows gradually, organizing itself in a certain order, it is solid but fragile. The death of a tyrant and other extreme upheavals shatter this crystal, and it is precisely this inevitability of change that the people who spoke of war after Brezhnev’s death felt.
Here everything is quite simple. The transfer of power has always been a problem for monarchies and dictatorial regimes, since this power is unique. It consists of many connections—agreements, obligations, and the like, connections obtained through different means, at different times, under different circumstances. To pass this from hand to hand so that nothing changes is impossible, since the “hands” are inextricably linked to the power itself. And the more authoritarian the power, the more singular it is and the harder it is to “transfer.” Accordingly, the more significant cataclysms occur when it turns out that this power needs to be “transferred” urgently. During the “transfer” everything changes, even if outwardly everything remains as it was—China after Mao is a vivid example.
So, if Putin dies, this will mean the death of his entire system, which cannot be assembled anew without him. It may assemble differently, and be no less dangerous, but all this will take time. Time—that is the gift that Putin can give us with his death. And then it depends on us whether we use this gift or not.