Vladimir Putin is known as Russia’s strongman president who has convinced so many in his nation and beyond of his skill in geopolitics. He was originally credited with doing much to relieve the suffering in his country from the poverty that marked the time of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin. Today the story is different. More experts are increasingly taking a different view, Putin is often now described as a reckless gambler. What is going on?

On November 15^th, the video of an event published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of a philosophical discussion on Vladimir Putin’s system of government asking the question: Why it is stable and why it will fail anyway?”.

Faced with the apparent paradox of Putin’s high level of support in the face of decreasing quality of life, many experts resort to clichés, citing the Russian citizen’s predilection for authoritarianism or apathy towards freedom. Leonid Gozman argued that this popular support has perfectly rational explanations, and how, nonetheless, the symptoms of the regime’s ultimate collapse are inherent to the system and already visible today.

Speakers at the event were Leonid Gozman, Former Short-Term Scholar President at the Union of Right Forces, and Sergey Parkhomenko, the Senior Advisor Journalist at “Echo of Moscow” Radio and the Former Editor-in-Chief at Itogi, Vokrug Sveta. The discussion lasted for 1 hour and some minutes. Take a look: