the new russian nationalismOne may question whether this is ever likely to happen since
patronal presidents, one may suppose, rarely decide to give up
their offices. But this can happen more frequently than one may
think for a variety of reasons. Some fall ill, generating expecta-
tions of their future demise. Others reach prominent markers of
old age, increasingly leading people to conclude that a succession
is nearing. Still others face term limits. Even though many presi-
dents attempt to have term limits overturned, some do not and
others are unable to do so, meaning that so long as term limits
are on the books, the president remains at a higher risk of becom-
ing a lame duck when she or he is in his or her legally final term.
And, finally, some presidents actually do decide not to run for re-
election as president. For example, in 2004, Ukraine’s President
Leonid Kuchma attempted to usher a handpicked successor into
office instead of running himself. In fact, even Putin opted to leave
the presidency in 2008 and then in 2012 effectively forced his suc-
cessor to leave office as he arranged his own return to the post.
The reference to Putin’s 2008 succession makes clear the follow-
ing point: a lame- duck syndrome is usually not by itself enough
to provoke the disintegration of a robust patronal presidential
system. Putin did experience significant turmoil in his political
machine in the lead- up to that election, but it survived intact
as he successfully guided Medvedev into the presidency (Sakwa
2011a). What we can say is that when a president becomes a
lame duck, pressures are created for the discoordination of the
system’s major networks. But how (or whether) the networks will
again manage to coordinate their activities is a separate question.
Since what matters most for a network’s power and wealth in a
patronalistic society is connections, what each of these networks
typically wants most is somehow to wind up on the winning
side of any ensuing political struggle. And this essentially means
trying to figure out which person is most likely to emerge as the
next president. Complicating this process is that any one person’s
emergence as the likeliest next president depends on how many
of the country’s most powerful networks decide to support him
or her. The succession competition, then, is essentially a kind of
self- fulfilling prophecy: unless relations are irreparably spoiled
for some reason, networks join the presidential contender they