In Putin’s Russia, Conditions Exist for a Coup but Not Yet a Revolution, El Murid Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 27 – Russia is not on the brink of revolution but all the conditions exist for a coup which might prove to be the precursor of a revolution, setting the stage for a course of development paralleling what Russian went through in 1917, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid.
    A coup of course like the February 1917 events will be the action of one part of the elite against another and that wants to push the latter out of the way to gain access to what are the decreasing resources available to those at the top (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/22634 reposted at charter97.org/ru/news/2024/12/29/624338/).
`    Such an action will change the cast of characters at the top but will not “help in any way” to address the fundamental problems of the country, El Murid says. But this threat of “a new February” is forcing the incumbent regime to engage in anti-crisis management because “it is no longer able to manage the processes” occurring throughout the elite.
    Thus, he says, the Putin regime “needs permanent crises as sources for such control; but those crises in turn continue to generate new contradictions and conflicts in the ruling elite and aggravate existing ones. After all, the tighter a spring is compressed, the greater is its tendency to decompress.”
    The plot of a new February, El Murid continues, may result only in a coup or become the trigger for a civil conflict, with portions of the elite drawing in larger groups to press their cases. And these possibilities may last for some time rather than being any instant solution to the problems Russia faces.
    But one thing is clear and must be kept in mind, he says. “In such plots, no ‘popular leaders’ will arise: they simply won’t have time to create their own independent organizational structures.” Any one that does appear to have arisen will only be a proxy for others at least initially rather than an independent actor in his or her own right.