Most observers see Putin as someone who, in New Yorker editor David Remnick’s words, seeks “power for power’s sake.” It’s not so. Putin is a potentially insecure leader who reacts defensively to domestic threats, not a hungry autocrat who lusts for ever more power. Since he became Russia’s president in 2000, as I show in a forthcoming article, most of Putin’s anti-democratic policies, reforms and actions have been put in place defensively, as reactions to real and perceived threats to his political security and survival. [...]
Putin feels threatened by individuals and organizations that have, first, the ability and resources to undermine his political control of Russia, and, second, the intent and motive to do so. And Putin sees those threats in many places. That’s why he has steadily moved to defend his power from the media, oligarchs, regional governors, the upper and lower houses of parliament, opposition political parties, foreign and domestic NGOs, and eventually the citizens themselves. [...]
But in December 2011, widespread reports of fraud sparked mass protests in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. Here’s how we know that Putin and his ruling circle were genuinely caught off guard by the election and its aftermath: Their party, United Russia, pulled in only 49 percent of the popular vote. That was still a plurality — but the 15-point drop startled observers and embarrassed the regime.
Why didn’t Putin’s sophisticated electoral engineers deliver a stronger result for the regime? Here’s the problem: Rigging results to hit a comfortable target requires knowing how much you have to add to the real vote. That requires a good estimate of how many legitimate votes you’re likely to get. In coming up short of 50 percent, Putin and his United Russia allies revealed that they had lost touch with Russian society and misjudged their true level of public support.
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