Men like Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Russian FSB, will do what\u0027s necessary if they perceive their interests are at risk
The oligarchs aren’t the ones who would turn on Putin. There is something of a power-sharing agreement between Putin and his oligarchical team, but it is one-sided and mostly economic: Putin allows them to run large moneymaking entities in Russia and abroad, and in return, they help him launder his own funds or assist him for whatever else he deems them useful. But the oligarchs have no direct access to hard power, such as police or other armed security forces in Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin , accompanied by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, attends a meeting with officials in charge of security matters at the Kremlin in Moscow on May 26, 2015.siloviki The siloviki are willing to use this deadly mixture of hard power and secrecy when a serious threat to the Russian kleptocratic system emerges. That’s because the security elite derives their power from the system. The whole operation can flex when threatened; street protests are tolerated to a certain extent, and Russia has withstood lesser Western sanctions in the past.
But what likely has the Russian autocrat losing the most sleep these days is that Putin, who takes the time to study history so as to better distort it, cannot have overlooked the coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. At the time, the Soviet Union was unraveling. Factories were failing because employees simply stopped showing up for work – because their employers had stopped paying them.
In this Tuesday, Aug. 27, 1991 file photo, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev rubs his eyes, seemingly exhausted from a gruelling special session of the Supreme Soviet that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union by about four months.The first to feel the sanctions will be the oligarchs, who have become accustomed over the years to wringing wealth out of Russia by virtue of the sweetheart deals Putin allows for their businesses. Sanctions on these businesses will gut the oligarchs’ wealth.
And all Russian citizens understand, almost at the genetic level, Putin’s ability to inflict terror and death on demonstrators. Russian opposition figures and journalists don’t want to end up like Boris Nemtsov or Ana Politikovskaya .
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