The Russian president has been able to prevent the political elite from breaking ranks by rewarding loyalty while threatening violence, experts tell Newsweek.
"We know that many members of the Russian elite were shocked by the 24 February invasion," Ben Noble, an associate professor in Russian politics at University College London, told."The vast majority had not been involved in the decision-making process, and, it seems, thought that Vladimir Putin was engaging in brinksmanship, rather than sincerely preparing for war."
"Vladimir Putin has created a personalist authoritarian system in which loyalty is often privileged over competence," he said."It is also a system with extraordinary coercive means domestically. Taken together, loyalty and the threat of violence are potent ways to prevent elite splits that might challenge the president's rule, even if people disagree significantly with particular policy decisions.
Even among those who have called for peace, like billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman, there have been no direct criticisms of Putin. "He was one of the last remaining 1990's-era liberal reformers in Putin's administration," Zhukov said."He has long been almost universally reviled by other groups of Russian elites on both the nationalist and communist sides of the country's political spectrum. His reputation is forever tainted by presiding over the botched privatization reforms of 1991, which helped create the oligarchs as a class in Russia.
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