HOW HAS PUTIN COUP-PROOFED HIS GOVERNMENT?

Over the past two decades, Putin and his allies have structured nearly every core element of the Russian state with an eye toward limiting threats to the regime. Putin has arrested or killed leading dissidents, instilled fear in the general public, and made the country’s leadership class dependent on his goodwill for their continued prosperity. His ability to rapidly ramp up repression during the current crisis in response to antiwar protests — using tactics ranging from mass arrests at protests to shutting down opposition media to cutting off social media platforms  is a demonstration of the regime’s strengths.

Putin has seeded the military with counterintelligence officers, making it hard for potential mutineers to know whom to trust. He has delegated primary responsibility for repression at home to security agencies other than the regular military, which both physically distances troops from Moscow and reduces an incentive to rebel (orders to kill one’s own people being quite unpopular in the ranks).

Putin has also intensified the coup coordination problem by splitting up the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies. In 2016, Putin created the Russian National Guard also called the Rosgvardiya  as an entity separate from the military. It performs internal security tasks like border security and counterterrorism in conjunction with Russia’s intelligence services.

These services are split into four federal branches. Three of these  the FSB, GRU, and SVR  have their own elite special operations forces. The fourth, the Federal Protection Services, is Russia’s Secret Service equivalent with a twist: It has in the range of 20, 000 officers. By contrast, the Secret Service has about 4,500, in a country with a population roughly three times Russia’s. This allows the Federal Protection Services to function as a kind of Praetorian Guard that can protect Putin from assassins and coups alike.

The result is that the regular military, the most powerful of Russia’s armed factions, does not necessarily dominate Russia’s internal security landscape. Any successful plot would likely require complex coordination among members of different agencies who may not know each other well or trust each other very much. In a government known to be shot through with potential informers, that’s a powerful disincentive against a coup. The coordination dilemma ... is especially severe when you have multiple different intelligence agencies and ways of monitoring the military effectively, which the Russians do. There’s just a lot of different failsafe measures that Putin has built over the years that are oriented toward preventing a coup.

The war has put new pressure on the regime, at both the elite and the mass public level, but the fact remains that Putin’s Russia is an extremely effective autocracy with strong guardrails against coups and revolutions.