Russia After Putin

Vladimir Putin, 73, has been Russia’s leader for over a quarter of a century and the driving force behind Moscow’s efforts to reassert control over its former Soviet and Tsarist empire. His eventual departure from the world stage will bring hope that a new Russian leader will end these imperial impulses and behavior. However, a review of Russian history, political culture, and elite and public opinion provides a clear warning that such hopes are unlikely to be realized. Russia after Putin is likely to be very similar to Russia under Putin.

But give up power he eventually shall, if only due to actuarial realities. The average Russian male born in Putin’s birth year of 1952 has been dead for 21 years. Granted, Putin has access to superior health care and has led an active and healthy lifestyle compared to many Russian men. An apparent germophobe, he takes exceedingly strict precautions regarding his health. Yet the day will come when Russian television programming is interrupted to play Swan Lake, the warning sign of death within the Kremlin’s walls. What then for Russia?

For the past quarter of a millennium, transitions from one Russian ruler to the next have been marked with various coups, attempted coups, and assassinations or poisonings. A peaceful transition from one ruler to the next has not been the norm.

However, another regular feature of Russian political transitions is that they do bring change in governing style, oscillating between harsher and lighter forms of rule, but always within the confines of some form of autocracy and dictatorship. Assassins (impatient with the pace of reform) ended Tsar Alexander II’s liberal era, to which Alexander III’s reaction was the consolidation of a police state. This was tempered by a more progressive domestic policy under Nicholas II, if only due to the revolution of 1905. Stalin’s terror was followed by Nikita Khruschev’s de-Stalinization and efforts at domestic reforms. When these proved unsuccessful and his foreign policy became too erratic, Khruschev was overthrown in a bloodless coup by Leonid Brezhnev. The Brezhnev years brought stability as well as stagnation. This was countered by Yuri Andropov who sought to bring discipline, energy, and a revitalized belief in Communism back into Soviet society. Only in the transition between Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko was the status quo maintained, if just because Chernenko lived for less than 13 months before being replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Putin ended the anarchy of the Boris Yeltsin years but also Russia’s nascent democracy.

Therefore, history suggests that a post-Putin Russian leader may bring some change compared to his predecessor. However, it also indicates that any change will be within the context of measures believed necessary to maintain the current system and not replace it. This should be understood so that in the future Western observers do not misunderstand cosmetic changes for structural ones. We should not forget past misjudgments such as the initial optimistic (and false) reports that Andropov was a closet liberal who met with dissidents to discuss their differences. Russian tsars, general secretaries, and presidents have a history of tactical changes and strategic continuity. The only exception was Gorbachev, whose reforms destroyed the ruling system by a complete misunderstanding of that system. Major changes to Russia’s current system are unlikely due to the nationwide antipathy toward Gorbachev’s tenure that led to collapse and chaos. Both the Russian people and their elites will recoil from any post-Putin leader that could be considered another Gorbachev because his legacy of catastrophic failure still permeates today.

Putin’s successor will have to operate, at least initially, within Russia’s present political system. He will also be influenced by international factors, economic realities, and social norms of Russia’s ruling class and society, which have been heavily affected by almost three decades of Putin’s rule including at least four years of war in Ukraine. This article will examine these factors, analyze the limits they impose on Russia’s next ruler, and describe why they are likely to result in continuity or, at best, change only around the margins in a post-Putin Russia.

Russia’s constitution states that in the event of a president’s death, resignation, or incapacitation, he will be replaced by the prime minister until elections are held in ninety days. In reality, Putin has no designated successor because it is too dangerous for any dictator to name a successor and allow opposition forces to accumulate around him. Instead, Putin balances between the leaders of various elite groups who operate the levers of coercion and oversee the sources of wealth within Russia. This balancing keeps possible successors under control by not allowing them to gain too much power. A culture of corruption adds to this internal balance of power because corruption makes all political players controllable by being compromisable.

Described as a “vertical of power,” this system is maximized to maintain Putin’s control over Russia but not transfer that control. Russia’s constitution gives this system just three months to hold elections after a president’s sudden departure. Since Russia’s electoral system is controlled by the Kremlin and will only produce results predetermined by the Kremlin, there will be little time for Kremlin elites to decide upon a new leader and arrange for the façade of an election intended to signify national approval and legitimacy.

The first challenge for any future leader after Putin will be to control a system that is both centrifugal and fragmented with reins of power emanating from the Kremlin but not touching each other. While all lines of authority center on the Kremlin, none are connected, and each are designed to balance, if not challenge, the other. The strength of each major political figure has been purposefully constrained so they cannot gain power with their resources (military or financial) alone and cannot trust those with whom they would have to coordinate to do so.

Kremlin elites live under a surveillance system maintained by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Federal Protective Service (FSO). The FSB, FSO, and other internal security organs such as the National Guard (Rosgvardia) are the primary guarantors of Putin’s system. They can also serve as a springboard for whoever wishes to gain power after Putin, and will be the new guarantors of power for whoever achieves it. Russia’s political structure is unlikely to evolve differently from the system Putin has created while these forces remain or remain unchanged.

Under these conditions, it will be difficult for a reformist leader to emerge. Since the system is not designed for shared power, the next leader will likely be someone who can move quickly to consolidate power and protect himself from competitors. This will limit his freedom of action since he cannot alienate too many Kremlin factions. As Otto von Bismarck once observed, “politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.” While facing this internal political reality, Putin’s eventual successor will face other limiting factors.

International factors for a new Russian leader will include the war with Ukraine (or its immediate legacy), uneasy relations with the West, and economic reliance on China. By illegally annexing Crimea, seizing the Donbas in 2014, and attacking Ukraine in 2022, Putin turned Ukraine into an implacable foe. Whether the war is ongoing when Putin leaves the political scene or there is a ceasefire, his successor will face a perpetually hostile Ukraine intent on recovering lost territories. Even with a ceasefire, Russia will have to maintain a sizeable army in its occupied lands and a war economy sufficient to support it. As long as Russia occupies Ukrainian territory, the European Union, the United Kingdom, most other industrial powers, and probably the United States will continue economic sanctions. Foreign investors will avoid Russia due to these sanctions and an investment climate that was deteriorating even before 2014.

Chinese oil and natural gas purchases and sales of dual-use technology for drones, missiles, and other weapons have provided Russia an economic and military lifeline. However, this aid has its limits. China purchased less Russian oil in 2025 than in previous years and overall trade fell as well from 2024. Chinese oil purchases are likely to decline further as Beijing implements an energy policy designed to boost energy self-sufficiency and diversify foreign sources of oil and gas. Furthermore, the war in Ukraine has cost Russia its lucrative European market for natural gas. This market cannot be replaced by a pivot to Asia due to sanctions and the limitations of Russia’s energy infrastructure, which is primarily oriented west and not east. While North Korea may provide weapons and ammunition, and India purchases its share of oil, war with Ukraine has left Russia with few trading partners. Additionally, Russia’s position in the Caucasus and Central Asia continues to decline and even historic, if minor, partners such as Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba are either no more or could soon be lost.

This means as long as Ukraine is a permanent enemy, a post-Putin ruler will have limited options to improve Russia’s economy by attracting international trade and investments. The amount of economic relief China will provide has probably been reached. This leads to the next challenge for a post-Putin ruler: improving the economy.

Russia’s economy is beset by high inflation, high interest rates, and low to non-existent growth, but has low unemployment due to a labor shortage. The labor shortage ameliorates some of the other poor economic trends by allowing workers to find employment, but it also inhibits economic growth. What growth there has been in the economy has been war-related, creating items that will be soon destroyed or designed to explode after production. They neither improve Russia’s infrastructure nor help the economy create wealth. Alexandra Prokopenko best described Russia’s economic situation when she wrote that the economy is busier but poorer with each passing year of the war.

With the exhaustion of savings in the National Wealth Fund, Russia’s government is challenged to fund both its operations and the war. Income and business taxes increased in 2025 but oil revenues were less than expected due to falling world prices. This trend continued into 2026 until the war in Iran radically reversed oil prices. How long this windfall will last is unknown. It provides a welcome if temporary safety valve for Russia’s troubled economy, but no fix to many inherent problems. It may also be counterbalanced by Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil exports.

Because of sanctions, Russia cannot borrow on the international bond markets as most countries do to finance budget deficits. VAT increased from 20 to 22 percent on January 1, 2026, which is supposed to generate $14.3 billion (approximately what a seven-dollar drop in world oil prices costs the government’s budget). Moscow also plans to reduce by sixfold the level at which businesses must begin paying VAT.

Putin’s successor will need to choose between guns or butter since the economy cannot provide both. However, even with a ceasefire, any transition from a war economy to a peacetime economy could threaten the regime. A ceasefire with Ukraine will raise expectations in Russia that wartime economic sacrifices can end. These expectations are unlikely to be met.

As stated above, the requirement to keep a large Russian army on occupied Ukrainian territory means that Russia cannot fully move from a war economy to a peacetime one. Furthermore, even a limited transition is fraught with political peril for the Kremlin. The cancellation of defense contracts, the main agent of limited growth in the economy, and the resulting layoffs of defense workers will raise unemployment at the same time a number of men will be demobilized and looking for civilian jobs. A decrease in defense expenditures will also threaten many banks who have been coerced into providing unsecured credits to the military-industrial complex. High interest rates will make it hard for companies to find the capital to retool their industries back to producing consumer goods.

All of these factors point to a major recession, a normal occurrence in industrial economies once a war ends. For Russia today, even a partial transition to a peacetime economy could lead to bank failures, increased unemployment, continued inflation and high taxes, and negative growth. The Kremlin could face social unrest sparked by the realization that the end of the fighting has not brought an end to sacrifices.

Based on international and economic realities, it would be reasonable for Putin’s successor to attempt to improve international relations, especially vis-à-vis Ukraine, so as to end Western sanctions, remove the need for an army of occupation, and attract foreign investment to buffer the transition from a wartime to peacetime economy to improve life for the average Russian.

This is unlikely to happen for three reasons. First, this is what Gorbachev tried in the 1980s. That gambit cost Moscow its empire and the Communist Party its power. It is not a strategy likely to receive warm approval in the Kremlin. Second, it would require Moscow to give up territories considered to be Russian soil taken or “recovered” at a tremendous cost of human life. This would fly in the face of social norms accepted by most Russians today: elites and average citizens. Third, tension with the West provides the Kremlin with a useful scapegoat to justify economic sacrifices that cannot end.

Social norms, the written and unwritten rules that govern acceptable behavior within a group, are a major influence on what is and is not possible within Russia’s body politic. The main norms applicable to a post-Putin Russia are how both Russia’s elites and society view who they are and what they want. This is often expressed in terms of a national idea or a national identity.

Per Ilya Prizel in his book National Identity and Foreign Policy, “a polity’s national identity is very much a result of how it interprets its history.” It can have an enormous impact on not just how a society sees itself but how its government conducts foreign policy based on that image. Russia’s current national identity is not just based on the past few decades of propaganda from Putin’s regime but on centuries of Russian history and political culture. It consists of a mix of Messianism, Imperialism, Eurasianism, and Re-Stalinization to create an image of a Russia oppressed by the West but also morally superior and distinct from it. The result is a national identity with a strong anti-Western animus, which is reinforced by the cult of the Great Patriotic War cultivated by Putin and memories of economic and national weakness during the 1990s. This mindset leaves little room for compromise over Ukraine or détente with the West.

Russian Messianism, the myth of Moscow being the Third Rome, implies both a civilizing mission for Russia and an accompanying need for a sphere of not just influence but control around its periphery. It also implies that its neighbors have a lack of agency to decide their own fates independent of Moscow. This is reinforced by Russian imperialism or at least nostalgia for Russian imperial power when, in the living memory of many Russians, Moscow exerted control from the Elbe River to Vladivostok and from the Arctic to the Oxus. Memories of empire are also memories of lost greatness that feed an identity wishing to return to that greatness.

Eurasianism, the belief that Russia is a unique civilization, neither Western nor Eastern, provides a distinct identity that rejects Western standards rooted in respect for the individual. Instead, Eurasianism emphasizes the importance of the “collective” over the individual and the uniqueness of the Russian soul. This is a message the Russian Orthodox Church also reinforces. While Eurasianism is not accepted by all Russians, it is consistent with a political culture that never experienced the influences of the Renaissance, Reformation, or the Enlightenment but did experience Mongol rule, centuries of autocracy, and Stalinism. Finally, the rehabilitation of Stalin’s image, the greatest mass murderer in Russian history, reinforces aspects of Russia’s national identity regarding the validity of autocracy, imperial rule, dehumanizing enemies, and mass violence to achieve social or political goals. Today, almost two-thirds of Russian citizens have a positive image of Stalin and many Russian politicians are inclined to speak of him in terms of a charismatic leader and strong statesman while hanging portraits of him in their offices.

This identity is reflected in such actions as constant conflict with the West including the use of assassinations, arson, subversion, and economic warfare; war in Ukraine that unapologetically features massive war crimes against civilians and massive casualties for Russia’s own citizens; and acceptance of economic hardships and a lack of personal liberties if in exchange citizens can still perceive themselves to be members of a great international power.

Per a 2014 Pew Research Center poll, nine out of 10 Russians supported the seizure of Crimea, believed Kyiv should accept its loss, and believed that there were parts of other neighboring states that should also belong to Russia. Even those who oppose the Kremlin can hold deep beliefs of Russian nationalism or chauvinism. This included the dissident Alexei Navalny who had espoused Russian nationalist themes regarding Central Asians and varied at times in his outlook on Crimea’s annexation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn resisted Communism but, just before his death, recommended annexing northern Kazakhstan into Russia and creating a Slavic union of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine led by Moscow. Even further back in Russian history, the great poet Alexander Pushkin opposed Tsarist autocracy but was quick to pick up his pen to support Russian imperialism in Poland as evidenced by his 1831 poem, To the Slanderers of Russia.

More recent polling indicates that while most Russians would like to see the war end, they are not willing to compromise to do so. In January 2025, a joint Chicago Council on Global Affairs-Levada Center poll indicated that three-quarters of Russians expected Russia to prevail in this war. The same poll indicated that 55 percent would like to see Russia as a great power feared and respected by other countries, rather than a country with a higher standard of living (41 percent). At the end of the year, a poll by VTsIOM reported that 70 percent of Russians expected victory in 2026. In January 2026, Levada Center sociologist Lev Gudkov reported that most Russians believe the war in Ukraine was imposed by the West and that Russia would eventually prevail. Gudkov spoke of a “militarization of consciousness” in Russia since it has experienced only six years of peace since the fall of the Soviet Union. He also highlighted a 2024 Levada Center poll that found that 65 percent of Russians agreed with the statement that, “Russia had never been an aggressor or initiator of conflicts with other nations,” up from 36 percent who believed that in 1998.

While caution should be attached to any polling done in a dictatorship, these polls, other studies, and the content of Russian state television warn that there may not be much of a gap in how ordinary Russians and the ruling elites see their national idea. Additionally, support for the war and a “my country right or wrong” attitude towards it among ethnic Russians is easier to sustain when the brunt of the war’s casualties are borne by other ethnicities and society’s outcasts.

Putin’s inner circle, from whom a successor will be drawn, is aware of these public sentiments. That group is also relatively homogenous regarding its worldview, which for most developed in Soviet times while serving in the security services or military. The one member of Putin’s inner circle who showed the slightest concern about the effects of the war in Ukraine on Russia, Dmitry Kozak, was replaced by Kremlin political chief, Sergei Kiriyenko, whose domestic portfolio now includes Russia’s relations with its so-called Near Abroad. Putin, it seems, is culling the herd so after his death there will not be a repeat of the mistake the Soviet Politburo made when they appointed from their midst a successor who destroyed them.

Whoever succeeds Putin will come from a very finite pool of candidates who have similar backgrounds and beliefs and have been together in power for years. They likely have a classic Groupthink mindset. That mindset was best expressed several years ago in an article, Putin’s Long State, by then Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov. In his article Surkov wrote that the current political order had passed its “stress tests” and “will be an effective means of survival and exaltation of the Russian nation for not only years, but also decades, and most likely the whole century.” For the inner circle, it is crucial that Putin’s death or removal means only a leadership change and not a regime change that threatens their own power, wealth, and lives.

Whoever replaces Putin will have limited options to improve Russia’s international and economic situations because to do so requires compromises that are unacceptable to most Russians, could threaten the stability of the regime, and would be incompatible with Russia’s self-image as a superpower. These factors are likely to take precedence over either world peace or a better economy.

Why cannot a new leader decide to end the war, blame it on Putin, and make major territorial concessions, hoping that propaganda and force would maintain his rule? One reason a future Russian leader might not make this decision is that he truly believes in the Russian national idea himself. Another reason is that he would immediately be accused of surrendering sacred Russian lands. This would provide the pretext for rivals to overthrow him. This action would have wide support from Russia’s veterans, military leadership, relatives of those killed in action, Orthodox clergy, ultranationalists, and ordinary citizens imbued with the belief that wherever the Russian flag is planted, it should never be taken down. The coup makers would gain legitimacy as patriots for doing so. Compromise over Ukraine is more likely to lead to a coup than peace.

Economic problems, unless they surpass those of the 1990s (which were bad, but most Russians can also remember surviving), will not force a post-Putin leader to take steps detrimental to his hold on power and contrary to the beliefs of most Russians. Whoever occupies the Kremlin next can never be seen as being dictated to by the West. He is therefore likely to stay on a path first trodden by Putin. This means policies that will continue to have the Russian people sacrifice, and be sacrificed, for the sake of national greatness. Russia’s future is most likely to be a real-world parallel to the perpetual war between Oceania and Eurasia in Orwell’s novel 1984.

Is this the only scenario possible for the future? No, but it is the most likely one, barring a revolutionary change in Russia’s national identity and domestic politics. Russia is unlikely to change its behavior externally until it changes its political culture and national identity internally.

The only other political transition, besides Gorbachev’s, that led to structural changes in modern Russia’s political system and foreign policy was the revolution of October 1917. Real change is unlikely unless preceded by some disaster that requires the Kremlin and Russian society to rethink their national idea as happened to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after World War II. Such an event would have to be a major catastrophe such as the loss of Asian territories to China in the event of a Sino-Russian war. This might make Russia identify more as a European state with Western values to counterbalance Chinese hegemony. However, losing the war with Ukraine could bring a different type of revolution. Since many Russians believe they are fighting the entire West and not Kyiv, losing the war could lead to political upheaval that reinforces an anti-Western national identity with a “stab in the back” excuse for losing similar to the myth propagated by Germany’s National Socialists after World War One. Therefore, barring an internal upheaval that orients Russia in a Western direction, a change in Russian national identity is unlikely. As the century moves forward, Russia will continue to be “Putin’s Russia,” which is patterned after 18th and 19th century Tsarist Russia or, as it is known to history, Imperial Russia.

Philip Wasielewski is the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare and a Senior Fellow in FPRI's Eurasia Program. He is a former Paramilitary Case Officer who had a 31-year career in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

This article was reviewed by CIA’s Prepublication Classified Review Board for classified information. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

This article appeared originally at Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).