Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia by Timothy Frye

Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works.

Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming omnipotence or Russia's unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies, and recognising this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin's power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin's Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy.

Drawing on three decades of his own on-the-ground experience and research as well as insights from a new generation of social scientists that have received little attention outside academia, Timothy Frye reveals how much we overlook about today's Russia when we focus solely on Putin or Russian exceptionalism. Frye brings a new understanding to a host of crucial questions: How popular is Putin? Is Russian propaganda effective? Why are relations with the West so fraught? Can Russian cyber warriors really swing foreign elections? In answering these and other questions, Frye offers a highly accessible reassessment of Russian politics that highlights the challenges of governing Russia and the nature of modern autocracy. Rich in personal anecdotes and cutting-edge social science, Weak Strongman offers the best evidence available about how Russia actually works.

FIVE MINUTES WITH Timothy Frye

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

How did you become interested in Russia?

My great-grandmother came from Poland, near the Ukrainian border, and the town where I grew up in upstate New York had a big Polish population, so I had a Slavic interest. I had a Russian language teacher in my public high school, and then I went to Middlebury College and studied Russian language and literature, which gave me a chance to go to in Moscow 1985. That was my first trip abroad, and I saw how exotic it was. I decided to go on to graduate school, and throughout the 1990s Russia was so fascinating. In my career choices, I went back and forth between academia, the private sector and government service, but academia just lured me in.

Why did you write this book?

It’s a celebration of academic research on Russia. The generation of scholars that came after me, many of whom were from Russia, was much better trained than mine. The social science revolution swept over them, for better or worse. The book tries to highlight research by people with strong social science credentials who also know the region. This research has strengths not represented in the broader public debate. We can’t compete with journalists on speed, or with foreign policy makers who write about being in the room. But academic work helps leaven the debate. The production cycle is longer, and we are less swayed by recency bias, and can’t be so openly partisan. The book tries to inform what we know from academic research about Putin’s popularity, Russia’s elections, corruption, foreign policy and so on. The trick was to convey the complexity of Russia without bogging down general readers in academic debates and jargon, so I injected my personal history in Russia to keep the story moving.

What is your key message?

You need to look beyond Putin if you want to understand Russian politics. He faces many more constraints than we commonly recognise. In domestic politics, the patterns we see are similar to those in other autocracies: how much to censor, whether to allow protests, how much authority and leeway to give to others, how much to centralise power. These are very common problems. Look at the invasion of Ukraine: you see the autocrat’s problem in getting accurate information. I wanted to show the trade-offs Putin faces: the more assertive your foreign policy, the more difficult for Russia to build the components of state power, like a robust economy It’s much more difficult to be an autocrat than people realise.

Has the invasion of Ukraine changed your views?

The thesis holds. It reflects the balancing act that he and all autocrats have to manage: how to keep your inner circle happy, prevent them overthrowing you and avoid public protests. But Putin has taken this trade-off to an extreme in a way I didn’t expect. Him being in power is a necessary condition for the invasion to happen. Even among his inner circle he seems to be the only one with a real obsession about Ukraine. I tend to downplay his background and worldview as an explanatory factor for many policies, but on foreign policy leaders matter more and during a crisis even more. In 2003/4 when oil prices were high, and after the 2011/12 protests, he could have easily reached out to the rising middle class. But he’s a statist and chose a different path.

What’s next for Putin?

The research is very equivocal. When personalist autocrats like Putin lose power, it’s usually via a coup, a revolt or some non-constitutional transfer of power. In the vast majority of cases, the ruler ends up in jail, exile or dead. The replacement tends to be another autocrat, because they come from a system that reproduces itself. But Russia is well educated and wealthy enough to be a democracy, it is close to Europe and urban, without the deep ethnic, racial and religious cleavages that plague other countries. A lot of the deep structural factors suggest Russia should not be as autocratic as it is. I want to retain the possibility for a surprise even if all the signs at the moment are very grim. I worry the war will go on. It’s hard to see Russia giving back territory and hard to see Ukraine accepting the loss of more territory that was taken from it. Even if there is less western support, Ukraine will continue to fight. 

What is the future for academics and their research in Russia? 

The bench is deep enough that there will continue to be much really interesting work done on Russia, under great constraints. Russia today even during war is not the Soviet Union, where scholars were forced to work with extremely limited and biased information. In the age of big data and social media, there is Telegram and the Levada centre. The real loser will be Russian higher education, which was a tremendous beneficiary and contributor to the study of Russia. Those institutional ties have largely been severed even if the personal ties remain. There will be networks of scholars who continue to work on Russia from abroad. It’s just become much more difficult but it is still really needed. We don’t want to go back to Kremlinology. 

What’s your next book?

It’s called Political Machines at Work and it’s about how politicians and employers subvert elections by mobilising their employees during elections in Russia and eight other countries – a big comparative study about autocracies but also the similar dilemma in democracies: employers have interests they would like their workers to support at the ballot box, but there is a delicate dance in how much they can pressure their workers without provoking a backlash. When I started the research, employers in Russia were much less likely to advertise that they mobilised their workers for political ends. Now [looking at Russia’s Z movement], they all feel compelled to play it up.