Putin’s Revolution May be Slow But It Very Much is a Revolution, Lea and Taskin Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 4 – Most people are so accustomed to thinking of a revolution as an event that happens with the seizure of power over a few days that they have failed to recognize that what Putin has done since his return to power in 2012 and especially launching his expanded war in Ukraine is a real revolution, albeit a “slow” one, Aaron Lea and Borukh Taskin say.

            The two Russian commentators say that it is worth remembering that Lenin did not define revolution in terms of the seizure of government offices but in an entirely different way. The Bolshevik leader defined a revolutionary situation as one in which “people at the bottom don’t want to live in the old way and the people at the top don’t want to run things that way either (moscowtimes.ru/2025/08/04/medlennaya-revolyutsiya-putina-a170633).

            According to Lea and Taskin, “the Putin revolution should be called an inversion of this: the people at the bottom don’t want to live in the new way, and those at the top don’t want to run things in the new – and as a result, those at the bottom are ready to return to a pre-liberal life and those at the top are ready to rule in a pre-liberal style.”

            Putin’s “’revolution of inversion’ is not a revolt against the institutional order but rather a sophisticated revolutionary usurpation,” they argue, with external forms more or less continued, but their content transformed in order to present what they are doing as a defense of what the population wants.

            Another important thing to remember when evaluating Putin’s “slow revolution” is that a revolution “is not just the destruction of institutions” either directly or indirectly “but instead a rejection” of relations from the immediate past in the name of something grander. And that is exactly what Putin has done, remaining in some international organizations but on his terms.

            Contrary to what many think, the two continue, Putin’s expanded invasion of Ukraine only accelerated a process that was already well in train for a decade or more. By means of it, “Russia transformed itself from a successor state to a rejectionist state,” one that insists “not that ‘we are Russia after the USSR,’ but rather that ‘we are Russia instead of that.’”

            Putin’s revolution is “just as fundamental a break with the past” as other revolutions; and at the same time, his regime “does not offer society a future” – it offers the freezing of the past for all time but in a way that does not appear as threatening to the population as an open declaration of this might. That is why his regime doesn’t offer any precise ideology.

            This “slow revolution has transformed Russia into a hybrid totalitarian state,” Lea and Taskin argue; and they point out something that also has been largely missed: “Putin’s inversion revolution is hardly unique: it continues a worldwide tradition of revolutions which have ended not in freedom but in the archaic.”

            They point to two recent examples of that pattern: the Iranian revolution of 1978-     1979 and the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. But other observers could easily add additions to this list and undoubtedly will. But they warn that these slow revolutions often “very quickly collapse” in a few days, leaving “literally nothing” behind them beyond the destruction they have wrought.