The Regime Has Entered A Phase Of Self-destruction

Why a court informant helped fuel the scandal surrounding Putin's granddaughter's lavish lifestyle.

Citing leaked data from the Russian Border Guard Service, the publication “Agency” reported on Friday, that it had identified Putin’s granddaughter.

Of course, the mere fact of having grandchildren is not in itself a discrediting circumstance. If there are children, there must also be grandchildren, but here are the details…

The conditions of the child’s travel described in the article—flights on private jets accompanied by numerous nannies, teachers, aides, and bodyguards—once again bring to mind the entire body of information that has ever been made public regarding Putin’s own lavish lifestyle. And that’s already unpleasant. At a time when the standard of living for the people is falling, the court’s excessive luxury is infuriating. Remember Marie Antoinette and Rasputin?.. It doesn’t help the president’s image that his family members, for some reason, love to travel to Europe—a continent that official sources have drummed into our heads is an existential enemy of Russia.

All in all, it’s an unpleasant leak, and the best thing the system can do in this situation is to keep quiet. If they don’t draw additional attention to the issue, there’s a chance it will soon be forgotten.

And that’s when the notorious snitch Borodin shows up, naturally giving the issue new momentum—stirring up a scandal. Why?!

Okay, one could assume that Borodin is just a helpful idiot trying to jump on the issue to prove his indispensability to the court. As if to say, “I’m right here, standing guard!” The hero probably hopes that Katerina Tikhonova will take notice of him. She’ll notice him and maybe even deign to receive him. All of this is understandable, but Borodin isn’t acting alone—he’s part of the system, which means he must act in the system’s best interests. He can’t engage in guerrilla tactics, pursuing only his own self-serving interests and harming the president. And where are his FSB handlers looking—since it’s obvious he has them?

And here the thought inevitably arises: perhaps his handlers are also interested in the scandal? Not just in terms of the stars on their epaulets, but also in a political sense? After all, the louder the issue gets, the more enraged Putin will be—and the more tasks he will assign to them—the people who are currently hyping up this story. And new tasks mean resources, authority—they mean power.

So the part of the system responsible for security is harming the part responsible for public policy. And here, it’s not at all necessary to assume some kind of conspiracy by the security forces against the political bloc. It’s all much more mundane. As I’ve already said, for those responsible for security, any new scandal is a new threat to the state, and a new threat means it must be combated. All of this inevitably leads to an increase in the institutional clout of those who do this. What is a problem from the political bloc’s perspective turns out to be a resource from the security forces’ perspective. Everyone acts logically—but in accordance with their own self-interest. As a result, the government as a whole acts irrationally.

The larger the system, the more difficult it is to coordinate the actions of its components from a single center, the greater the level of autonomy of those components—and the more often the logic of their actions is determined by their particularistic interests, pursued to the detriment of the whole.

Putin has turned the country’s political and administrative system into a slow-witted monster. It’s like a dinosaur whose tail is being eaten off by a nimble mammal—before it even gets around to turning its head…

But in general, it’s important to understand that this isn’t just about sluggishness. It’s about concrete harm. Of course, neither Borodin nor the security officials behind him intended to harm Putin on purpose, but their actions resulted in harm nonetheless. In other words, the system turns out to be capable of causing harm automatically.

If such a monster has no external enemy, it can somehow manage to survive for a long time. But if such an enemy exists—if it deliberately exploits the system’s weaknesses and mistakes—the end will come much sooner. Surprisingly, Putin is persistently increasing the number of these enemies.

Perhaps this fact can be taken as proof that the regime has entered a phase of self-destruction.

Abbas Gallyamov, “Tochka”

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