Authoritarian regimes usually thrive where people are poor, poorly educated, and have little basis for comparison.

That observation is not wrong. And yet Russia seems to break the rule.

It has one of the highest shares of university degree holders in the world. Millions of educated people can clearly see that Putin is dragging the country down. And still, many of those same people fear his departure more than his rule.

At first glance, that looks irrational. But it isn’t. They have reasons. The problem is that those reasons are not obvious from the outside.

Today, I want to show you why life without Putin terrifies so many Russians more than life with him.

Here’s our roadmap:

• Mad for Control — why Putin’s system treats any loss of control like a mortal threat
• Chaos Is Worst — why people fear sudden change more than slow decay
• The Body Remembers — how old catastrophes still shape behavior, even when memory is gone
• The Patron Trap — why careers, money, and safety in Russia depend on personal protection
• We Are Putin — how a ruler turned into part of national identity
• When Luck Runs Out — what happens when the leader of the pack misses his prey

Mad for Control

Putin’s system is obsessed with control. That is the first thing many outsiders miss. Those on the top are control freaks. They experience uncertainty as personal doom. Those who weren’t born control freaks were shaped into this mold as they progressed through the ranks.

In a healthy political system, failure is unpleasant, but survivable. The machine stumbles but keeps moving. In Russia, the state machine has been built in a very centralized way. Too much depends on one man, one vertical chain of fear and loyalty. If that center visibly weakens, everybody below starts asking the forbidden question: Who protects me now?

This logic is best visible in how they frame the war.

For Putin and the people around him, defeat in Ukraine is terrifying because it could expose the whole illusion.

If Russia is not winning, then maybe the boss is not all-powerful after all. And if the boss is not all-powerful, then maybe his protection is beginning to fail. Once that doubt appears, the clans beneath him start to shift. They whisper, they hedge, they prepare for what comes next.

And that is how his system begins to unravel.

For the people who depend on Putin’s protection, the stakes are personal. Nearly all of them have spent years living above the law. Some merely dodged taxes or embezzled money. Others committed far more serious crimes. The whole logic of the system is that the elite stands beyond accountability. That is not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

Trump, for all his bluster, has one advantage Putin does not. He can retreat from a bad decision and survive it. He can announce one thing in the morning, reverse himself a week later, blame advisers, markets, disloyal people, or bad timing, and keep moving. He has done exactly that in more than once. In April 2025, for example, he abruptly reversed course on a major tariff move after market turmoil. It may look chaotic, even ridiculous, but at the end of the day, it’s better for everyone. The damage from the bad move is mitigated when it’s rolled back.

Putin is built differently, and his system is built differently, too. He cannot shrug and say, “Fine, that didn’t work, let’s try something else.” In March 2025, he publicly vowed there would be no retreat in Ukraine. He’s doing it not because he still hopes to win, but out of fear that he loses everything by backing away. Putin’s power rests on the image that he always knows what he is doing and never loses his grip. The moment he openly backs away, he looks weak. And in a personalist system like Russia’s, weakness at the top is like blood in the water.

Chaos Is Worst

Most ordinary Russians are not comparing Putin’s rule to living in a free, democratic state. They are comparing Putin’s rule to a total collapse.

That is the trap.

Russia’s change into its current state happened gradually, giving people time to adapt. If you remove elections all at once, people feel robbed. But if you turn them into theater step by step, people grow used to the theater. If you cut the internet off completely, it feels like catastrophe. But if you throttle it, block it, patch over it, and force people into workarounds, many will simply shrug and say, “Well, that’s how it is now.”

The same thing happened with the war. Even the full-scale invasion did not enter Russian daily life as one giant rupture for most people in the big cities. There was no total mobilization on day one or instant blackout. The war came in waves: new symbols, new censorship laws, more coffins in the provinces than in Moscow. Then mobilization, but partial. Then drones, but not everywhere. Then inflation, but not total ruin. Then internet disruptions, but irregular. Each wave by itself looked survivable. Together, they changed the country.

This is one reason people tolerate far more than outsiders expect. Slow descent does not register in the nervous system the way sudden collapse does.

And there is another layer here. Russians do not primarily fear “dictatorship” in the abstract Western sense. Many fear something more primitive: that the state may stop performing its most basic functions. That pensions will not be paid, medicines and food will not arrive to the stores, heating will fail in winter. That coming out into the street, you’ll be at the mercy of whoever is younger, meaner, and armed.

This fear is not stupid. It has history behind it.

The Russian Civil War was exactly that kind of breakdown: state collapse, hunger, disease, violence, shifting loyalties, neighbors turning into enemies. It left a massive collective trauma.

If you want a sense of what it felt like for an ordinary person to live through that kind of chaos, my Russian Treasures novel shows how people survive it, outsmart it, and what it costs them.

The Body Remembers

Russia does not remember its greatest internal disasters clearly. But it still behaves as if it does.

That is the strange part.

When people in the West hear “historical trauma,” they often imagine a society that talks about its pain openly, builds museums, argues over guilt, teaches children what happened, and passes down names and stories. Russia did almost the opposite. It buried some of its worst memories so deep that many families can barely explain what happened to their own great-grandparents.

But silence does not erase fear. It only pushes fear deeper into the body.

The early Soviet state sorted people into categories of danger. Millions learned that a “wrong” background could close doors, cost rations, block passports, destroy careers, and stain your children. The lishentsy, the disenfranchised, included former nobles, clergy, traders, “exploiters,” White officers, and many others. Even when this category disappeared formally in 1936, the reflex to change dangerous pieces of your family’s past remained.

That is how memory gets amputated.

A family does not say, “Your great-grandfather fought on the wrong side.” It says nothing. Or it says he was a worker when he was not. A grandmother does not explain why she whispers when politics comes up. She just whispers. A mother does not give you a lecture on authoritarian adaptation. She teaches you with one sentence: “Be careful who you talk to.”

This is how trauma travels after the facts are gone.

Don’t stand out. Don’t speak first. Don’t trust appearances. Don’t challenge power unless you are absolutely forced to. And most of all, when the weather changes, keep your head down until you see who survives.

That is why so many Russians can live for years inside a degrading system and still fear change more than stagnation. They haven’t learned to ask, “Is this fair?” Their bodies and minds have been conditioned to ask, “Will this end with hunger, arrests, and everyone for himself?”

Even the Soviet treatment of the Civil War reveals this fear. Instead of facing it as a national wound, the regime turned much of it into folklore, operetta with cardboard heroes, and simplified propaganda. Imagine making a cheerful musical out of Verdun or Gettysburg. That would look insane. In Russia, that kind of falsification became normal.

The Patron Trap

Here’s another reason why the idea of Putin leaving frightens so many people who are not even fans of Putin.

In a society with strong institutions, your position rests at least partly on rules. Your diploma and contract matter. Your business can survive a change of government because the law does not vanish every time one man falls out of favor.

In Russia, that security is much weaker. What protects you is often not the rule, but the patron.

You rise because someone stronger decided you are useful. You stay because your usefulness ties you into a chain. A university rector has a minister above him. A regional boss has a federal curator. A businessman has a security officer patron. A governor depends on the Kremlin. Everyone is plugged into someone else’s survival.

And that produces a very specific kind of fear.

If the top breaks, the chain shakes all the way down.

This is one reason personal loyalty matters so much in Putin’s Russia. Even powerful people are not secure in an impersonal way. They are secure because they belong to the right web. And webs do not transfer cleanly from one spider to another.

That arrangement can feel stable for a long time. It even feels rational from the inside. If the courts are weak and property rights are selective, then a patron is more valuable than a lawyer. If law is not dependable, protection becomes the real currency.

But protection has a dark side. The same network that shields you also traps you.

You cannot leave easily because other people’s interests now run through you. You signed things. You know things. People above you expect loyalty; people below you depend on your own place in the chain. Your salary, your status, your apartment, your school for the children, your mother’s medical treatment, your business license, your freedom from criminal charges — all of it may rest on who would still answer your call if trouble starts.

So when outsiders ask, “Why are they so afraid of change?” the answer is often brutally simple.

Because their social capital and protection depend on the system with Putin on top. When they imagine Putin being removed, even in a non-violent way, they do not imagine Russia turning into a normal republic. They imagine patrons falling, clans fighting, files opening, scores being settled, and no one left to shield them when the knives come out.

We Are Putin

A lot of ordinary Russians, who are not part of Putin’s vertical of power, still have their identity tied to him, just in a different way. For them, he’s a symbol of national pride and the feeling that Russia still matters.

That is why arguments about corruption, brutality, censorship, or even military failure often bounce off. It happens because you’re attacking not merely bad decision-makers but the structure that many people use to explain who they are.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, life in many ways became freer. Millions of people got things Soviet life could not offer: choice, private income, consumer comfort, a chance to build something of their own.

But another thing vanished. The feeling of imperial significance.

In the Soviet system, even a poor and half-starved person could still believe he belonged to a mighty historical project. His country was “building the future.” It had a grand mission. You might live badly, but at least your suffering was attached to something vast.

Post-Soviet Russia was richer in consumer goods but poorer in meaning. It sold oil, gas, metals, and timber. It did not really produce an inspiring future. It stopped exporting a grand idea and became, in the eyes of many, a raw-material appendage with nuclear weapons and nostalgia.

That is a humiliating role if your identity depends on belonging to something “great.”

And that is the problem with resource wealth. If money comes simply because your country happens to sit on oil and gas, what exactly have you achieved? Where is the personal dignity in that?

Meanwhile, the state watches closely to make sure you achieve nothing outside its system. In that kind of order, there should be no success without permission. Even an Instagram influencer selling eyelashes and bras is meant to understand that her success is tolerated only for as long as the state allows it.

This is where Putin became useful.

He offered not just order, but restored scale. He gave people a language in which Russia was no longer secondary. Under him, Russia was “rising from its knees.” Under him, it was feared again. Under him, even cruelty could be reframed as strength, and international isolation as proof that the country was too proud to obey.

That is why I keep saying that support for the war is often about despair. For many Russians, the war in Ukraine became a desperate attempt to recover historical importance. A horrible and criminal attempt, yes. But emotionally, it is still an attempt to answer one painful question: If we are not feared, not admired, not building anything great, then who are we?

I remember one of my friends screaming at me near the beginning of the war: “We are Putin. Me, my mother, my whole family.” She was defending her personal identity. If Putin is a criminal, then what does that make the people who built part of themselves around him? If his project collapses, what is left of their national self-image?

That is the deeper trap.

When a ruler becomes your last usable source of national pride, life without him starts to feel less like political change and more like personal disintegration.

When Luck Runs Out

Authoritarian systems talk constantly about strength. But deep down, they are deeply superstitious.

They watch for omens.

A ruler who keeps winning begins to look chosen. Not in an official religious sense, like in imperial China, where a successful emperor was believed to hold the Mandate of Heaven. But the instinct is similar. If history keeps carrying one man forward, people start to read that as proof that he is meant to rule.

And if he is meant to rule, then the country must be in the right hands.

Safe. Protected.

That is one of the hidden pillars of Putin’s legitimacy.

For years, he looked lucky. Oil prices rose during the crucial period when his system was consolidating. The state regained money. It started to pay salaries and pensions regularly. The 2000s felt, to many Russians, like an exit from the humiliation of the 1990s. Then came the war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, Syria, repression at home, poisoned opponents, broken treaties, all sorts of things that should have destroyed a leader in a healthy system. Yet he kept surviving. He kept landing on his feet.

To many people in Russia, that matters more than law or morality. Because luck reads as control.

Many ordinary Russians do not check the news in order to learn the truth. They check whether the frontline is still moving in the right direction. Whether “we are advancing.”

It barely matters whether that advance is ten meters, a hundred meters, or a village no one had heard of. The symbolic function is what counts. If Russia advances, then the ruler is still strong. The state machine is safe from immediate collapse.

But this is exactly why the eventual rupture, if it comes, may feel sudden even after years of decay.

People who live inside a system like this often do not prepare for disaster realistically. Instead, they engage in wishful thinking. They hope the ruler will pull another rabbit out of the hat and rescue everyone. They hope things might work out well again, simply because they worked before.

The cruel irony is that the longer the illusion lasts, the less prepared people are for the moment it breaks. That is what happened so many times in Russian history. The catastrophe did not feel close until it was already in the room. The state looked clumsy but stable until all at once it appeared exhausted, confused, and weak.

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