My TakeStrongmen like Putin only get stronger after a failed coup

Nietzsche famously wrote that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. That may be truest for autocrats who survive a coup.

A common assumption is that a failed insurrection can still make its target vulnerable and open to future attacks or internal collapse. That, coupled with a good deal of wishful thinking, has led to volumes of ink being spilled over how the aborted coup by the Wagner mercenary group against Vladimir Putin in June would nevertheless spell his inevitable demise.

There has been a whole journalistic sub-genre with article titles such as “The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble”, “Putin’s weaknesses laid bare”, and “This is the end of the road for Putin”.

And since anything bad that happens in Russia is automatically linked in such Western minds to something bad about to happen in or to China, there has now evolved what we could call a secondary journalistic sub-genre which goes along the lines of the following: “Why Wagner revolt is such a nightmare to Xi Jinping”, “Wagner uprising highlights China’s risks with Russia”, and “Prigozhin’s uprising failed, but it triggered China’s ‘psychology about warlords,’ top White House official says”.

Students of history would not at all be surprised by the findings in “The Rush to Personalize: Power Concentration after Failed Coups in Dictatorships”, published in the March edition of the British Journal of Political Science. It came out a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine but well before the failed mutiny led by Putin’s one-time trusted henchman, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The team of researchers from Purdue University and Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, and the Barcelona Institute of International Studies in Spain reached the following conclusions: “Personalism [personal centralisation of power] can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that failed coups are information-revealing events that provide the dictator with strong motives and ample opportunities to accumulate power. The leader uses this window of opportunity to rapidly consolidate his power at the expense of the ruling coalition.”