Don’t Pop the Corks Yet, ‘Putin’s (Still) Not Dead’

Twice this week the rumor mill has gone on high alert because of unverified reports that Vladimir Putin is no more. So twice one of his lieutenants has come forward to say that reports of the Russian dictator’s death are greatly exaggerated. Politico:

An unverified report that Putin had gone into cardiac arrest, published on a Telegram channel on Sunday evening, got the rumor mill going — forcing Peskov to firmly deny the claim.

“Everything is fine with him,” Peskov originally said on Tuesday.

There is a great deal of secrecy around the personal life and health of Putin — who seeks to project a strongman image to the public — which has been a topic of speculation for years.

So far, Russian authorities have almost invariably denied the rumors surrounding Putin’s health — with one notable exception.

In 2018, after he disappeared for two days just weeks before a crucial presidential election, Peskov made the rare admission that the president had “a cold” which he blamed on “winter.”

The old adage, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” would seem to apply to these ongoing alarms about Putin’s health. You may recall this rather spectacular story from December 2, 2022.

Then, last but not least, are the stories about how people in the Kremlin want him dead.

Roman Emperor Domitian is remembered for only one joke. “It’s a terrible thing to be an emperor,” Domitian said, “because everyone thinks your paranoia about being assassinated is groundless—until you’re actually murdered!” Soon after Domitian was assassinated. Extreme vigilance is the essential mood of tyranny, which must inhabit that condition not just first because it is indeed in danger of overthrow and surrounded by enemies but also because it requires its people to be fearful and isolated, therefore conditioned for extreme solutions. President Vladimir Putin is living proof of this conundrum.

The recent drone attack on the Kremlin may have been the work of Ukrainian or internal Russian factions, possibly within his own wider security organs, or a ‘false flag’ operation by the regime itself, but it was inevitable that the dictatorship would claim it was an assassination attempt on Putin. This is absurd since everyone knows that the president does not live in the Kremlin but outside Moscow in his gilded mansion, Novo-Ogaryovo. Yet Domitian would sympathize because Putin has every reason to fear assassination. […]

Every wise tsar knows that his constant poise must be ferocious vigilance. Peter the Great set the standard of the all-talented emperor and supreme commander to which Putin—along with every other Russian ruler—aspires but he faced constant plots against his life which he handled himself by personally torturing and executing thousands of mutinous musketeers; he even tortured his own rebellions son Alexei to death. Peter invented modern Russia—even its name Roosiya was coined by him—as a new empire; he took the title imperator. The state has never developed from that vision. But this imperial self-image also sets a perilous standard for Peter’s admiring successors: the tsar – whether president or general-secretary—is also a military commander.

If a Russian ruler cannot dominate the “Russian world,” he will disappoint history. Peter was overwhelmingly successful in his wars—but even he was nearly captured and defeated by the Ottomans. Yet the dream of every Russian ruler is conquest. In 1904, Nicholas II’s Interior Minister V.K. Plehve, supposedly advised, “What this country needs is a short victorious war.” Every ruler (even in our democracies) aspires to one of those. Nicholas II instead faced a disastrous defeat vs Japan; but Putin built his imperial presidency and garnished his swaggersome overconfidence with a run of three ‘short victorious wars’ in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria. But they were minor skirmishes; Ukraine is proving very different…

Indeed, Ukraine is proving different. Putin would undoubtedly like to think of himself as reprising the Stalin role in WWII, where Russia held out and defeated the German army. In point of fact, he may be closer to Napoleon. Putin marched into Ukraine, as Napoleon marched into Russia, confident of a swift French victory, only to find himself decisively beaten.

We are told that, “Ivan the Terrible and Stalin died in their beds by wreaking such havoc around them that no one dared destroy them. Putin is a killer but not yet a mass killer on their scale.” So his fate would seem to be at a crossroads now: he might become a mass killer, as they did, or he might die of causes, natural or unnatural, before he has to chance to go down in history alongside Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. Or, maybe Putin will go the way of Khrushchev, who was overthrown and forced to retire in 1964 after he risked nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody knows.

The only thing anybody seems certain of is that it’s not going to take forever for Putin’s fate to be sealed, one way or the other. And as Clarence Darrow said, “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I’ve read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction.” You may depend upon that reaction, universally, when news of Putin’s death is confirmed. That much is already carved in stone.