A Front-Row Seat to Russia under Putin

“I think he’s sorry he started this war by now,” said Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist and dean of the London Business School, who was at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy on Oct. 10 for the latest Policy Outlook event. 

In an expansive discussion with Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, the dean and Sydney Stein Professor at Harris, Guriev shared the view from his front-row seat on Russia’s political transformation under Putin over the past 25 years. Introduced by friend Konstantin Sonin, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at Harris, Guriev spent more than an hour answering questions about Putin’s leadership, the war in Ukraine, and a range of other topics from Bueno de Mesquita and those who were at the Keller Center for yet another Harris event illuminating a global policy issue.

The Fireside Chat used Russia and the war it launched in Ukraine in early 2022 as lenses to examine policy at a time of questions about governance, democracy, and global order. The aim was to explore strategies democracies can adopt to defend truth in the face of misinformation and strengthen institutions.

“I'm not here to criticize certain political movements and forces because my core mandate is teaching business, which makes the life of a university leader much simpler these days,” Guriev said. “What I am going to talk about is completely academic, inspired by what's happened in Russia.” And that, he said, is how over 25 years, Putin, “who pretty much randomly ended up where he was, decided that he's going to stay there.”

Guriev was in Russia until 2013 when — he said in a podcast early this year — “people close to Vladimir Putin suggested that I should buy a one-way ticket as soon as possible. That’s what I did.” While in Russia, he was a professor of economics and rector at the New Economic School in Moscow and wrote speeches for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, whose term lasted from 2008 to 2012. Putin at that time was prime minister and is now in his fifth presidential term. 

Guriev also advised opposition leaders including Alexei Navalny (who died in a Russian penal colony in 2024) and co-wrote a report that criticized the treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who clashed with Putin and served 10 years in prison.  

Since 2000, Guriev said, Putin has been “accumulating power, removing checks and balances, taking over the judiciary system, taking over law and order, sometimes threatening businesses, and therefore building a system which looks like democracy but doesn't function as democracy.”

That strategy, or “toolkit,” to authoritarian power is amplified in Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, Guriev’s 2022 book with Daniel Treisman, a University of California, Los Angeles Professor. Their book describes how Putin and other authoritarian leaders such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan exert control through distortion of information and simulation of democratic procedures. “Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support,” the book’s publisher says. 

It took time, Guriev said, for Putin to control Russia’s levers. And key to his success was early economic growth.

From 2000 to 2010,  Russia had one of the best decades in its recorded economic history, Guriev said, adding that Putin promised to double incomes and did. 

That was partly due to luck, he said, and partly due to the reforms carried out right before Putin came to power on Dec. 31, 1999, and in his first year in power. Then economic growth stalled. Putin, Guriev said, had largely gutted the forces needed to drive economic growth, such as integration with Europe and additional reforms.

“He built a system where businesses became loyal to him — and those who didn't want to be loyal were no longer there — and where media was controlled,” Guriev said. “And in that system, economic growth started to stagnate. But at that point it was too late for the actors to stand up against him.”

Guriev said his book talks about how those actors (academics, lawyers, journalists) from the informed part of the society — the people who understand that the country is going in the wrong direction — must organize, mobilize, stand up and fight. That did not happen in this case. 

Society, he said, consists of two groups. One group understands what's going on while the other is not well-informed and gets information from a controlled media that is telling them things are fine because their pockets are full and the country is going in the right direction.

That division, he said, makes it essential that people think about how they get information. Where, he asked, do they get an alternative point of view? 

“It's not just in Russia, it's in many countries including this country, that people may believe very strange theories of how the world functions,” he said. “And if you manage to control the information sphere, you can pull people up to a point.” Though, he noted, that “you cannot fool all the people all the time,” a quote widely attributed to President Abraham Lincoln.

“At some point,” Guriev said, “people will notice.”

Does he see any parallels in the United States, where Bueno de Mesquita said there is much talk about what’s being described as rising illiberalism, a decline in checks and balances, and misinformation and manipulation? 

Guriev answered in what he described as abstract terms, noting again that he runs a business school that doesn't have a political position or take part in political debates, and that he is not a U.S. citizen. But, he said, this is at the core of the book, the sense that aspiring authoritarian leaders take the same steps to installing an irreversible illiberal trajectory. “This,” he said, “is the toolkit.”

Some such regimes, he said, emerged from old style repressive dictatorships becoming “softer.” Some emerged through an authoritarian populist taking office through elections.

In the latter case, for example, leaders who understand that economic growth will have stalled and they'll be kicked out of office in the next election, need to make sure that the next election is not free and fair. And for that, he said, they need to pack the courts, undermine the integrity of elections, silence the media, and divide and conquer civil society and business.

“This is the set of tools which is described in [many] books, whether they’re called a ‘dictator’s toolkit’ or not,” he said.

For Putin, following the toolkit has not been without bumps, including the gamble he took by invading Ukraine. 

“Whether this gamble could have played out the way he wanted, we don't know actually,” Guriev said. “What we know about the first days of the war is that it was actually quite close to happening.”

Who knows, he said, what would have happened if Russians took over Hostomel Airport, which is just outside of Kyiv. The battle for the airport was among the first of the war and Russia’s loss hobbled troop movement.

Has Western policy, Bueno de Mesquita asked, been successful in putting economic and political pressure on Putin over the war? Or has it pushed Russia away from the West and closer to Iran and China? China could ask Putin now to end the war as without China's support, he could not continue, Guriev noted.

The United States and Europe should have done more to bring the rest of the world into the sanctions coalition and sanctions should have been tougher, Guriev said.

“People are saying, ‘look, sanctions tough or not tough have not worked because the war continues.’ And I think this is a very myopic proposition,” he said. “Imagine a scenario where the West doesn't increase pressure on Russia. In that case, Putin would still have his large sovereign wealth fund, which would not be only 2% of GDP like now, but more like 20%.  Think how many more soldiers he could have recruited. If there were no oil sanctions, he would be receiving much more money. And if there were unfettered access to Western technology without export controls, it would be much easier for Putin to win this war.”

“If the West did not impose these sanctions but limited the sanctions to what we observed after 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, I would actually bet my money that this war would have already ended in Putin's favor,” Guriev said. “Sanctions have prevented Putin from winning this war. Nobody's happy about what's going on, but it could have been much worse.”

Is there, Bueno de Mesquita asked, a path back for Putin and Russia? 

“In our book we assume no, but in social sciences you never say ‘no.’ … So, who knows. Maybe Putin will not be considered the most evil dictator in the world after something else happens. … But today, Vladimir Putin is an untouchable evil, even if we live in a world where you can imagine an even worse one.”

And for those who ask what will happen to Russia when Putin is gone, Guriev points to the film The Death of Stalin, a 2018 dark comedy that is about the power struggle after Joseph Stalin’s death, which is banned in Russia.

“Russia is not going to become a Jeffersonian democracy overnight … for the reason that these people don't know how to run the country without him.  They will fight each other. Some of them will fall out windows, and at some point, the country and its leaders will need to start divesting the regime because life is not good for anybody,” Guriev said, suggesting that Russia will evolve.

He points to Germany after World War II. “Many people supported the regime. Many people opposed the regime. But Germany is now one of the most stable and successful democracies in Europe,” he said.

“There is nothing genetic about Russia being committed and wedded to non-democratic regimes,” Guriev said. “I think there is a way forward for any country, for any society.”