How Does the Weak Strongman Stay in Power? Exposing the Roots of Vladimir Putin's Rule in Russia

Abstract

C onventional wisdom holds that populations support autocrats only because they are coerced, bribed, or brainwashed into obedience. Driven by this perception, much of the public discourse and analysis of contemporary dictatorships ignores the role of societies in the rise and operation of these regimes. Similarly, many of the checks on authoritarian power are downplayed. Elections are assumed to be so reliably manipulated, protest and opposition so effectively quashed, and all other institutions and elites so thoroughly co-opted that they do not meaningfully shape politics in these countries. Unsurprisingly, most of the ink is spilled on the seemingly all-powerful puppet masters. Dictators’ personalities, obsessions, and purported worldviews are obsessively scrutinized as the ultimate resource on politics in these regimes. These accounts of court intrigue and leadership produce gripping narratives. But their pervasiveness creates an illusion that autocrats operate with very few constraints. They also make us lose sight of the fact that dictators are products of the circumstances in which they rule at least as much as they create them. Timothy Frye’s Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia is thus an exceptionally timely and prescient treatise, addressing these pathologies in the study of one of the most consequential present-day dictatorships: Russia under Vladimir Putin. Weak Strongman is not based on new research by the author; instead, the book is an exceedingly rare species: an effort to distill the cumulative wisdom of political science research on the Russian and other autocracies, and in a way that makes it widely accessible beyond narrow scholarly circles. The book’s core mission—and achievement—is to bridge the gap between the scholarship on Putinism and similar regimes and how these are understood in policy circles and by the public. In this sense, Weak Strongman tries to reverse a frustrating trend. Over the two decades of