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Because princes are of short life, it must be that the kingdom will fail soon, as his virtue fails. Hence it arises that kingdoms that depend solely on the virtue of one man are hardly durable, because that virtue fails with the life of that one; and it rarely happens that it is restored by succession (Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I 11: 4, 35-36).

I have invariably proceeded from the premise that I need to be doing what I believe to be right for our country. When I do something, I do it not for the sake of pleasing someone abroad (Vladimir Putin, News Conference, 17 December 2020).

Is it possible to imagine contemporary Russia without Vladimir Putin as its leader? The present Speaker of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, then deputy chief of staff of the Russian president, was very clear about the answer when he asserted that without Putin there would be no Russia (Moscow Times 2014). For those who are in their early twenties or younger, the question seems justified, as there has simply been no other Russian leader around for as long as they can remember. There certainly was the bracketed president and former prime minister, Dimitriy Medvedev, but not even when he was president between the years of 2008 and 2012 did the public take him seriously. Everybody knew who was pulling the strings, his prime minister at the time, Vladimir Putin.

Since the last year of the 1990s, Putin has held a unique position at the center stage of Russian politics, either as president or as prime minister. His personal popularity may have had some temporary dips, most obviously in connection with the “farcical” (Hanson 2011: 34-35) or even “callous and casual” (Koesel and Bunce 2012: 417) transfer of presidential power from Medvedev and back again to Putin in 2011-2012, but overall, the sustenance of his popularity has been remarkable. Halfway through his fourth presidential period in office it may finally start to wear thin, but there is no doubt that it has proven remarkably sturdy for more than two decades. It is the endeavor of this book to try to find explanations for this durability but also to discuss what dilemmas Putin’s unique and total dominance have given rise to and are likely to engender in the future.

In general terms, this book is focused on the concept of legitimacy and its application in the hybrid authoritarian political setting that contemporary Russia represents. More specifically, it will discuss legitimization strategies employed during the Putin era, with special attention to the strategies used from Putin’s third presidential tenure onwards. In more straightforward terms the research questions that the book seeks to answer are therefore: How has Putin’s legitimacy been constructed and sustained during his third and fourth terms in office? What challenges are there to his legitimacy as a political leader? How is the question of political succession dealt with? What problems may the legitimization strategies employed during Putin’s long incumbency bring for his future successor?

There are several reasons for the focus on Putin’s third and fourth terms in office. First, the 2011-2012 events brought about an unprecedented legitimization crisis for the Putin regime. Declining approval rates for Putin indicated this. They hit a low and remained at that level until early 2014 when they were boosted again after the support of the insurgency in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. The re-legitimation strategies used by the regime during Putin’s third and fourth periods in office were a mixture of old and new, but the new elements were so assertive as to warrant the label of “high Putinism” for the political period that they marked.

In view of the content and style characterizing foreign policy actions and domestic politics from 2014 onwards, Putin’s third and fourth periods in office can be regarded as qualitatively different from his first two presidential terms between 2000 and 2008. Indeed, in the words of one prominent analyst, Russia at the time of the crisis of legitimation in 2011-2012 and Russia from the time of the annexation of Crimea onwards are “like two different countries, belonging to different historical eras and separated not merely by a few years but by decades, if not centuries” (Sharafutdinova 2020: 4).

In non-democratic systems, legitimacy and issues of succession to the next generation of political leaders are two sides of the same coin (Snyder 2018). This is another reason why the empirical focus of the book is on the third and fourth presidential tenures of Vladimir Putin. Succession issues were not very relevant during his first two presidencies, as the incumbent himself was then relatively young and the constitutional limitations to a prolongation beyond the second term in office were still not overtrodden. Towards the end of his second term in office many observers tended to believe that the two Putin terms were to be followed by two Medvedev terms, whereafter a third actor would enter the stage, much like in democratic systems. These pundits turned out to be deeply mistaken.

As this book nears completion, during the first part of 2021 and halfway through Putin’s fourth presidential term, succession issues are still not on the agenda, at least not officially. In 2020, constitutional amendments were hurried through and adopted to get rid of a succession dilemma which consisted in the fact that, on the one hand, the incumbent president due to constitutional regulations would have to leave office in 2024, while, on the other hand, he had no credible candidates to succeed him. The constitutional amendments fixed part of the problem as they made it possible for Putin to stay on for two more tenures, up until the year of 2036, should he and the electorate so wish, and his health so permit. However, this did not change the basic problem, as the succession issues continued to simmer below the surface. Putin, born in 1952, is certainly not getting any younger. Things may happen along the way as they are prone to do in life, and the setup of presidential contenders seeking to fill any political vacuum is still conspicuous by its absence. This is the Putin predicament: It is time for him to go, but there is no one in sight to succeed him. Moreover, as will be made clear in this book, it will be very difficult for anyone to succeed him as current strategies of legitimation have been almost exclusively focused on his person.

The crisis of 2011-2012, when Putin was reinstated as president after Medvedev’s first and only term, was so far the greatest challenge to his popularity. Even then, however, he was able to maintain a level of public approval above the 60 percent level. Four times over, he has been elected president already in the first round. As pointed out by Sharafutdinova (2020: ix): “Putin’s appeal to many Russians has been real, and the analysts need to take this reality seriously”. What accounts for his success? How long can his personal popularity withstand the wear and tear that a long incumbency and exposure to at least some policy failures would necessarily seem to entail? Are we, due to the year of 2020 that was so rife with formidable political challenges of different kinds, from the ravages of the covid-19 pandemic to the confrontations with the media power and charisma of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, finally reaching the limits beyond which Putin’s legitimacy can be stretched no longer?

The renowned independent Russian sociological institute Levada Center has carried out a series of monthly polls starting at the time when Putin first took office as prime minister in 1999. These polls are studied attentively by analysts all over the world, and the president’s approval rates seem to be as much of an obsession on the part of the Putin regime as it is among political observers abroad (Andrews-Lee and Liu 2020, Willerton 2017, Petrov et al 2014: 5). Similar surveys are conducted on a regular basis by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) and the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), both of which are more closely connected to state authorities. Despite this difference, the three polling institutes tend to come up with similar trends, not least since they often use the same methods and indeed fieldwork teams when making their surveys (Yudin 2020: 7).

According to the monthly figures, Putin’s approval ratings have by international comparison been uniquely high ever since Levada launched its series back in 1999. As of May 2021, they had since he first became president in 2000 never been below 59 percent, a low point which was reached in April and May 2020. Moreover, the approval rates had always superseded his disapproval ratings by a wide margin. There was a lengthy downturn in connection with the challenges against the Putin-Medvedev tandem in 2011-2012. Despite this severe stress test for the regime, Putin managed to reverse the development. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was widely popular and in its wake the president’s ratings turned steeply upwards again. For almost four years, they stabilized at or even reached above the 80 percent-limit, not sloping downwards until the summer of 2018 when an unpopular pension reform made the figures drop (Logvinenko 2020). The unruly year of 2020 saw both the devastation caused by the corona pandemic and the Russian constitutional reforms, which made it theoretically and legally possible for Putin to go on serving as president until the year of 2036. During 2020, the ratings swung back and forth in an indeterminate manner but sloped anew, approaching the levels of 2011 and 2012 from the late fall onwards.

1 The negative trend basically continued in early 2021, at the time when this book was finalized.

From January 2021 onwards, the Putin regime seemed to be slated for its gravest stress test since the legitimation crisis of 2011 and 2012. Putin was openly challenged by the opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, who was subjected to an assassination attempt orchestrated by the regime in August 2020 (Bellingcat 2020), survived it, was hospitalized in Germany, openly blamed Putin for being behind the murder plot, and then returned home to Russia in December 2020, only to be apprehended, incarcerated, and sentenced to a perennial prison stretch by the authorities. Through a widely influential film on Youtube about the incumbent president’s lavish holiday estate and about his alleged widespread and corrupted business activities, Navalny managed to put more than one chink in Putin’s armor. People all over the country turned out to demonstrate their support for Navalny and their discontent with a regime increasingly perceived to be ossified. The jury is still out at the time of writing, but there is reason to believe that this development might imply the onset of Putin’s deepest crisis of legitimacy so far.