Analysis: Time is running out for Vladimir Putin’s rule

VLADIMIR Putin’s new presidential term is just beginning, but it increasingly looks like the beginning of the end. Whenever Russia’s people pour into the streets en masse, as they are now doing, from that point on things never work out well for the authorities.

In 1917, Russian emperor Nicholas II had to abdicate in the wake of mass street protests, clearing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1991, the Soviet Union – then seemingly an unbreakable monolith – collapsed in just a few months. Now it is Putin’s turn.

Russians are famously patient and slow to rebel. And who would blame them? If protests have turned out badly for Russian governments over the centuries, they have ended even more disastrously for the protesters. In 1917, liberation from absolute monarchy ushered in an even more despotic form of absolutism. After 1991, Boris Yeltsin’s unruly privatisation reduced millions of people to penury, and elevated a corrupt oligarchy into virtual rulership.

But, despite being well aware of their history, once Russians turn on the man at the top, they don’t stop until he is out.

History debunks Putin’s myth that the majority of the country supports him because they want “stability” and that the protests, headed by “western stooges”, are about to subside. They won’t abate. “Soft power” has the upper hand today, and you can’t shut down the internet.

In January 2000, the novice president Putin gave a slew of persuasive interviews to Russian TV networks, praising the rule of law and promising not to remain in office a day beyond his two constitutional terms, or if he lost popular support. These are the “rules of the game, of democracy”, he said.

Putin is entering his 13th year in power, with 40 per cent of the population desperately wanting him out. If history is any indication, that number will only grow.

• Nina Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at The New School university in New York and is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute