censorship, repression, confrontation with the West and aggression towards neighbours.
His willingness to throw away the post-cold-war rulebook and ability to use force have
given him a tactical advantage over the West.
But 30 years after the Soviet collapse, another fast and powerful historical current is
moving against the remnants of the Soviet order. This current will intensify in 2021,
exposing the costs and failures of Mr Putin’s policy. Having bet his legitimacy on the
idea of imperial resurgence, he has alienated most of the former Soviet republics, which
now see Russia as a threat rather than a magnet. His annexation of Crimea and the war
in Donbas have cost Russia its relationship with Ukraine. And the six-week war between
Armenia and Azerbaijan, which ended in a Russian-brokered peace deal on November
10th, showed the growing role of Turkey in the region.
Perhaps nowhere is the Soviet legacy being challenged as visibly as on the streets of
Belarus, one of the most authoritarian and seemingly docile parts of the former Soviet
empire, now being swept by a national uprising. For the past 26 years it has been ruled
by Alexander Lukashenko, a populist former collective-farm boss, who used the Soviet
legacy as a foundation of his regime. He got rid of the red-and-white flag first introduced
in 1918 during a short-lived period of Belarusian independence and then re-adopted in
1991, swapping it for a modified version of the flag of Soviet Belarus. With the help of
Russian subsidies he kept factories in state hands, repressed his people and rigged
elections in the name of stability.
In August 2020, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to protest
against his stealing yet another election. He greeted them with violence, turning a
protest into a national uprising. Demonstrators wrapped themselves in the national red-
and-white flag and sang Belarusian songs, which Mr Lukashenko tried to drown out
with Soviet music.
The national awakening was rightly perceived as a threat to Mr Putin’s regime, too—not
only because it exposed the brittleness of dictatorship, but because it challenged its
shared ideological foundation. It also struck a chord with protesters in Khabarovsk, in
the Russian far east, who took to the streets at almost the same time, after the
government in Moscow arrested their popular governor. And whereas the Kremlin
backed Mr Lukashenko, its opponents in Russia cheered Belarusian protesters and
displayed their flag on the streets and on the internet.
Like Mr Lukashenko, Mr Putin has built his ideology almost entirely around Soviet dates
and symbols. He has turned the military parade marking the Soviet victory in the second
world war into his main official pageant. In 2020 it preceded a pseudo-referendum on
constitutional changes that reset Mr Putin’s presidential term limit to zero, enabling him
in theory to stay in power until 2036. Yet his approval ratings and his legitimacy are
steadily declining, along with Russians’ disposable incomes. A stagnating economy will
not reverse this trend.
The poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, with Novichok, a
military-grade nerve agent, seems like a sign of desperation. Mr Navalny’s survival and
his assertion that Mr Putin was behind the attack have further undermined the
president’s standing.