Problem 2018

In 2010, Vladimir Putin, then the prime minister, was asked during a meeting with journalists: is he far away? “Lucky those who are lucky,” Putin joked, but his “apron” began to be almost seriously discussed as a factor in foreign and domestic policy. Oil grew in price. The budget was bursting with money. Russia received the right to the Olympics and the World Cup. The Russians, believing that well -being - forever, indifferently looked at how an authoritarian regime is being formed in the country. Household appliances on credit and rest in Turkish hotels have become more important than talking about the fate of the homeland. And all the successes - both real, and those invented by propaganda - were directly associated with one specific person. With Putin.

But Fart is over. Foreign policy adventures have brought a regime to a dead end. The collapsed oil finished off the economy undermined by sanctions. The Olympics, if remembered, is more likely as a large -scale spending than as a national holiday. And even Turkish hotels are not available to Russians. And from the west, former partners send quite intelligible signals: Putin is not the person with whom you can negotiate something. Putin is a problem. The problem is 2018.

An open conversation about the prospects for changing power for the Putin elite, of course, is impossible. But the choice is offered too simple: either international isolation and tightening of the regime within the country (in which, as it happened in the history of Russia, the security of the elites is not guaranteed by anything), or ... committees, members of the Lake Daches of the Night Hockey League-all of them owe Putin their current position. Are they able to think about the situation in which Putin’s preservation in power will represent - not for the country, but for their understandable skin interests - a great threat than leaving? And do they have options for answers to a question that cannot be asked aloud?

But there are also regional elites who even risk arguing with the center today, as, for example, Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov, who refused to tear economic and cultural contacts with Turkey. There are other leaders of the "national regions" who are now vying to Putin's allegiance, but can lead themselves in a completely different way when the economic crisis will intensify. Or when Putin leaves.

And there is a political system completely sharpened under one specific person. A person’s departure is equivalent to the breakdown of the system. And if by the time of departure the new rules of political game will not be proposed, the country will collapse along with the political system.

Speaking seriously, this is the main political task for the coming years - to find the solution to “Problems - 2018”. The decision that lies somewhere between the transformation of the country into a huge concentration camp, surrounded by barbed wire, and on the outside frightened neighbors, and collapse, the formation of a series of bloody "people's republics", khanates and specific principalities.