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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.

Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.

One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.

(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)

Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).

What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.

Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?

Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?

But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.

("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)

In any case, I am curious what others think.

I believe Putin’s awareness is underestimated. Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position. His real problem is controls.

You (Putin) can give any orders, but the longer the hierarchical chain of command they have to travel to reach the ground – the more they will disperse through attempts at every level to spread and avoid responsibility. There is no guarantee any order would be executed. You can iterate through all possible officials and commanders to find those, which work (and we’ve seen how many military officials have been changed since the start).

But you can’t iterate much through the pillars of your domestic power and administration – elites and technocrats. Technocrats/ managers do their job well, but there is only so much they can do with their tiny but precise levers. The real issue is that one of the primary mechanisms, through which Putin has been feeding his domestic elites for decades – is government contracts and corporate shares/management. But gradually it has rotten so much as to become a device solely for cash transfers. There has been many purges of petty fraudsters during the war – across all industries, like aerospace, military complex, high tech – but you can’t purge everything. And even after purge, it takes time to rebuild Potemkin industries, especially when many of them turned out to depend heavily on imported components.

In this situation your most reliable option is to order big impactful things, with sufficiently big impact-margin to account for all efficiency lost during implementation. This include diplomatic sabre-rattling, mobilization decisions, huge geoeconomical levers like shutting pipelines, etc.

As for awareness, Putin can observe the whole internet, including western media and analytics, which he surely understands is more reliable. At the same time he can query any of his subordinates, posing whatever uncomfortable questions he likes: they would serve you the bullshit, but the manner in which they do it certainly tells a lot. He can request a phone call to officials anywhere on the ground – and figure out why the governor of Kherson is unable to reply since a week. So at the bare minimum Putin can connect all those dots and infer the situation at least at strategic – “upper operational" level, but has little to change it.

Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position

On the other hand, people don't make blunders until they do.

The fact that Putin has managed to stay in power until now means he's decent at staying in power, sure, but it doesn't make him infallible. And if you become paranoid and get rid of any possible threats around you, you also get rid of anyone who might correct you when you do make a mistake.

Good point. It's a classic tradeoff, facing dictators: by over-optimizing your domestic environment for survival and rents, you may severely damage incentives of people to compete for anything except your patronage. Conflicts with foreign powers/ technological backwardness often make this clear.

Putin famously hardly uses the internet. He doesn't own a smartphone and thinks the web is controlled by the CIA.

Apparently he gets most of his news from spy agency briefings. These have the problem so common in dictatorships that nobody wants to give the boss bad news.

Since the beginning of war I've seen rather high levels of bureaucratic activity: officials fired and reshuffled, legislative trappings expanded, corporations merged and shuffled. I take this as evidence, that at least some information trickles down to Putin's mind.

The point is not that he is personally fond of gadgets or internet. To survive in his vipers nest, he needs a lot of information, from various sources/services, competing and being played against one another. I doubt it's as simple as "everyone just serves him rosy reports": when one official over-serves his rosy vision, his rival might undercut him by serving something closer to reality, with more details. It's more effective to compete down toward ground truth, gradually adding more details, than to race up - into more and more delirious and vague positive reports.

Is it actually the case that competition trends towards the truth? That would be ideal, but why would you be sure that a more truthful report will be looked at more favorably by Putin? How would he distinguish a truthful from a rosy report other than the truthful reporter having an easier time adding details that a rosy reporter would have to make up? Maybe the sweet spot for competition is a rosy report that is (arbitrarily) 20% rosier than the actual truth, and Putin looks badly on reports less rosy or more rosy than that. Who knows?

I mean, the western news media are, in effect, controlled by CIA. Or rather, the US nomenklatura -the elite body. whose members are usually very highly placed. Consider ECFR's (the EU sister organisation)'s own inforgraphic.

Not overtly, there editors know what to run and what not, and if someone doesn't take the hint the resident nomenklatura representative takes the case on.. When the journalist strayed too far from the approved narrative on Douma, an 'editor' who was unlike other editors during curiously little day-to-day work according to their CMS, but had spent several years working for the US nomenklatura got on his case. Of course, it ended up with the foolish journalist leaving.

Internet though, isn't, as Putin who is no doubt well familiar with the extent of Russian cybercrime because it regularly causes international incidents knows.

Is there any particular reason we should trust the takes of "Swiss Policy Research"? A cursory inspection suggests that they are generic FUD-spreaders looking to appear more dignified.

I'm not actually objecting to the premise that American interests dominate western news media, but do you really need a shadowy conspiracy to explain that?

You want WaPo ? Here's WaPo writing about the same thing.

You can check out the OPCW Newseek post I linked by the journalist fired. He specifically mentioned the most aggressive person who took him to task over the story was a suspiciously inactive editor who mostly posted jokes and only edited politically sensitive stories. And an ECFR alumnus.

As to the SWPRS article, it could really be anything, from some pissed off Swiss journalist to an unusually slick presentation by Russian intelligence. What matters is that it checks out, largely. But does it matter ? It's boring, right. Who cares that a notionally democratic republic somehow, no matter which party wins, ends up with members of a specific organisation in key posts. Who cares that nothing ever really changes, policy wise. Voters just haven't expressed their preferences!

CFR membership isn't even secret. It's just an incredibly boring topic nobody cares about. Who gives a shit that most of every US cabinet in last 100 years are members of the same pretty exclusive club ? Bores and morons like Chomsky, that's who.

Journalists don't. Some dopey professors.

“America’s single most important non-governmental foreign-policy organization”, whose primary role is to “define the accepted, legitimate, orthodox parameters of discussion.” According to Cohen, “the CFR really is what the Soviets used to call the very top-level of the Nomenklatura.”

Journalists are carefully trained to avoid touchy subjects. Hence, you will never hear about CFR unless you go to e.g. Infowars.

The point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway. () They have been through the socialization system.”

Inspite of people like e.g. J.K. Galbraith saying things such as:

“Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people.”

I have no problem believing f.ex. the local Finnish media is biased (ironically often slightly on the pro-Russian side until Russia went out of their way to burn every bridge they possibly could). Claiming that they're controlled by some US body is some next level conspiracy theory stuff, though.

You got 5 upvotes for a reply that seems to be based on a complete misreading of my post.

The link I posted doesn't claim Finnish media is controlled by CFR. It says CFR members are in every major US media organisation. Who are, in addition, owned by a very few business entities.

Although ,living in a small country and seeing the dismal state of Czech media, which is basically "publish your own takes on foreign policy stuff that are basically what WaPo / NYT said two days ago", there's really no need for control.

They (in this case 'Respekt', a leftist weekly reprint Fareed Zakaria's editorials quite often, and there's really nothing NYT prints they disagree with.

If you intend to make a claim about US media, you should say so instead of writing about "western news media". The latter clearly includes European medias and trying to claim they are "controlled by CIA" is outright conspiracy theory stuff.

What, you think that guy at Newsweek who was an 'editor' but with a suspiciously light workload is the only one European CFR alum out there ?

Depends how strongly you interpret "control". I don't know if it's CIA in particular, but it's pretty clear the Western media coordinates to hammer the same message.

As for awareness, Putin can observe the whole internet, including western media and analytics, which he surely understands is more reliable.

Why are you so sure about that? Both the capability and the interest in doing anything of the sort.

First assumption is that he cares about his political survival and understands which domestic and foreign variables to track. Second, that he receives highlights from western media/ analysts anyway. If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him. Seems like a standard routine for an autocrat who is fed up with sycophants.

This would also apply to many historical kings / military leaders, and suggest they didn't make the many catastrophic mistakes that they did make despite that.

If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him

Every autocrat who is fed up with sycophants arranges a RCT? Can you name even one who has done that?

Stalin was notably paranoid. He constantly reshuffled and purged party cadres, and closely watched and probed members of his inner circle (~7 people). He often brought them to his dacha, at night, for a supper, forced them to drink until they loosen their tongues enough; tested food on them, as he feared it might be poisoned. He probed them tête-à-tête, played one against another by sharing his "suspicions", etc. Even dragged them to his personal month-long vacations for closer monitoring. Not to say about spying. This is an example of a dictator, trying to deal with sycophants and the threat they pose.

Another example is about notorious over-reporting in Soviet economy. It seemed to me they used some concrete scheme to get right estimates, but I can't find details.

Ministries would want to help out struggling enterprises. On the other hand, the ministry itself has targets that it must meet. If it is too easy on its own enterprises, then the ministry target will be jeopardized. Enterprises can “fool” their superiors only at the margin. Ministry staff personnel have considerable production experience and are able to detect gross misreporting on the part of their enterprises.

For earlier instances I was thinking, eg, about Henry VIII's reign with his court, being dominated by factional strife. Again, I didn't find how exactly he coped with conflicting views from rival groups, trying to topple each other, but it seems he at least acknowledged various interests behind them (although, arguably still was over-influenced by certain figures like Wolsey, Cromwell).

When Henry heard of these proceedings he consulted the judges before summoning a delegation of the Commons to present themselves before him.

Cranmer had been accused of tolerating heresy within his diocese, but the King left him free to hold his own enquiry, and this exonerated him. Later that year, probably in November 1543, the conservatives on the Privy Council asked the King’s permission to present heresy charges against the archbishop. Henry assented, but warned Cranmer what was afoot […] Cranmer had not only survived the attacks directed against him; he had also strengthened his position and his influence with the King.

...to summon a synod for the purpose of defining the Church of England’s position on matters of faith. The discussions were heated and exhausting, and Hugh Latimer – at that time Bishop of Worcester and a prominent advocate of reform – recorded his opinion that ‘it is a troublous thing to agree upon a doctrine in things of such controversy, with judgements of such diversity, every man (I trust) meaning well, and yet not all meaning one way’.

Roger Lockyer, "Tudor and Stuart Britain"

suggest they didn't make the many catastrophic mistakes that they did make

It's hard to gauge, because mistakes also result from poor implementations and irreducible contingencies. I said "Putin’s awareness is underestimated", not that he or every autocrat is omniscient.

Every autocrat who is fed up with sycophants arranges a RCT? Can you name even one who has done that?

Sounds like something much more common in LessWrong-sphere fiction than reality, to be sure.

That's not unlike LW concerns about artificial intelligences: one needs to start with certain unspoken assumptions for these ones to lead to where you see them going. Sure he is motivated to survive: it's not clear he knows effective means to maximize his odds of survival, that's the whole problem (starting this war has done very little good for his long-term survivability, I think). I don't see reliable indications of Putin knowing how to use personal computing devices, or knowing that they're safe and worthwhile to use, or believing that people who use them are trustworthy. Klimenko asserts he doesn't use any gadgets or Internet. His professional career started and ended while they were of no consequence, and computers were basically specialized scientific/military tools (in his world at least); ever since then he's been bossing other people around, and mainly people from the same generation and way of life, people who are his direct threats, by means that have changed little since Assyria or, at most, Medieval Muscovy. Decades ago there were some staged videos of him using a PC I think; this, too, looks fake as hell (though maybe not as fake as these people believe).

If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him.

As LWers like to say, we have trained doctors who can't handle elementary statistics crucial for interpreting test results. How the hell is Vladimir Putin supposed to know what an RCA is? Where will he get «independent analysts», through which causal chain – would he, like, growl at one of his 3-5 direct retainers and order to round up some eggheads in an unbiased manner? Why would he see reason to doubt his advisors in the first place? You assume an outside view, expected of a guy with an intellectual interest in governance and social structures, who has read books and articles and blog posts on history, politics, economy, epistemology... But you are not him. He's a political animal: that much we know. We can't really say more.

In your analysis, he's basically unable to affect precise terminal outputs; this seems fair. We don't really know if he receives meaningful inputs either. You probably remember that event. Kremlin may be the biggest Potemkin village of them all. Potemkin zoo, even.

I don't see reliable indications

What indications would you imagine? That Peskov or some news media would mention in a passing, that Putin "recently browsed runet to gauge domestic sentiment", "Putin is actually very modern, high tech guy, he uses PC and internet regularly"? or that Putin would conspicuously tap at his smartphone during meeting or forum? You would dismiss those signals as a part of "enlightened monarch" theater (like videos you refer to). It means there is no reliable evidence to reject the hypothesis outright.

My core belief is that an autocrat would learn to filter higher level signals on which his survival depends. Higher level means he is like a mediocre CEO/ early modern ruler -- he doesn't know how stuff at lower level works, he knows how to build and manage patronage networks, play them against one another and how to discern through them any conflicting information. That's rather weak assumption on his part, much less than classic field-independent rationality with infinite computing power.

Do not sweep me into "LW", that's a weird rhetorical device. Methodologically, my main issue here is to find how to evaluate likelihood of what we observe about Putin, given my or your hypotheses. Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative of a stupid "political animal". My assumptions rely more on historical parallels and general logic of delegation/ autocratic rule. Public image of savvy rulers of the past also didn't reflect hidden variables of their decision making.

that much we know. We can't really say more

No. That much we observe. And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.

It's not very fair to dismiss my arguments on grounds that I could as well have made worse ones in a counterfactual world where there were more evidence against my case. It's just bad faith. Suppose I claim that in a world where there's as much data in favor of Putin being minimally tech-literate as there is for Trump, Medvedev or Obama I'd have agreed with you, but in our one the specific evidence provided (testimonies of pro-Putin people, a single terrible montage in many years) supports me better. Well, this cannot be proven, can it?

Even astroturfed personas are based on some nugget of truth. Putin's macho persona, for instance, is due to him liking sports and especially sambo. To give off a fake impression of his familiarity with sambo, his side would have had to somehow fake his personal connections preceding access to substantial power, a ton of photo and video content and so on; that'd be hard-ish and prone to failure. It's about as hard to fake tech literacy; and Peskov's insinuations that Putin is tech literate would be really sus without faking more context. So I buy that he really is a tech illiterate sambo guy.

But your idea doesn't depend on him being tech literate, so that all is a tangent. You're arguing that he has the high-level understanding to make use of modern information infrastructure, or keeps around some people who can do that. This is what I'm analogizing to LW mindset (again, it's not fair to dismiss that as a rhetorical device, it's a good faith reference to a phenomenon we discussed earlier). It can be called «generality hypothesis». LW AI riskers assume, in short, that almost all powerful AIs will act like utility maximizers cutting the shortest path towards maximum reward value (inherently so, or with extra steps). This is far from certain; it may well be that many strategies towards capable AIs that are currently in development won't exhibit this property. Likewise it's not clear that Putin's political success to date indicates that he's a self-aware political power maximizer who understands that knowledge is power, proactively seeks out knowledge and devises strategies from domain-specific first principles. Or as you put it:

an autocrat would learn to filter higher level signals on which his survival depends. Higher level means he is like a mediocre CEO/ early modern ruler -- he doesn't know how stuff at lower level works, he knows how to build and manage patronage networks, play them against one another and how to discern through them any conflicting information. That's rather weak assumption on his part

I do not think this is a weak assumption at all, or that it should be the default hypothesis, or follows from your observations like reshuffling of administrators (this might happen in any disturbed hive, mechanistically). My null hypothesis is that ours is a (perhaps extremely) degenerate case of autocracy, that Putin is not that savvy at this autocrat thing, and owes his success at staying in power solely to narrow specializations like building a small intensely loyal mafia family and murdering key people outside it. It just so happens that his dacha cooperative also controls the levers of power in Russia and can act like a Singleton; their power-grabbing aptitude and toolset don't generalize to other scenarios.

I also do not believe that inter-service rivalry in Russia has a noteworthy epistemic dimension and doesn't amount to mutual distrust and libel, to prevent them from ganging up on the Czar. The task that he was solving and proved adequate for, centralization of power in Russia, did not require data from beyond Russian «patronage networks» so his tools may not have evolved to gather or transmit such data. He knows very well that Gerashchenko won't stab him in the back (now for certain!); he didn't know whether Medvedchuk had any pull in Ukraine or whether Yanukovych stood a chance, and may be equally misinformed now with regards to the war effort. This is all without even getting into speculations about his own wishful thinking and echo chamber effects.

I am not sure we can reduce uncertainty here by discussing precedents. Mine is certainly a maximalist position. Let's see how our respective models hold.

And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.

That's fair enough.

[You] I also do not believe that inter-service rivalry in Russia has a noteworthy epistemic dimension and doesn't amount to mutual distrust and libel, to prevent them from ganging up on the Czar.

The following excerpts are from the "Russian Military Intelligence: Background and Issues for Congress (Updated November 15, 2021)" [pdf]:

The FSB, however, has sought to gain a greater foreign intelligence role and has significant international operations, especially in Russia’s neighboring post-Soviet states.30 This reportedly has caused significant friction within Russia’s intelligence community, especially with the GRU and SVR, which consider foreign intelligence collection their primary responsibility. The FSO operates as an overseer of the various security services, helping to monitor infighting and the accuracy of intelligence reporting.

However, as analyst Mark Galeotti has opined, “Russian collection operations are not just highly active but also extremely professional. Tasking, though, appears less impressive. While the Foreign Intelligence Service and GRU have a strong sense of the military and technical secrets they are meant to uncover, their political objectives are sometimes naive.”

Here's from Joss I. Meakins (2018) "Squabbling Siloviki: Factionalism Within Russia’s

Security Services":

In fact, the question of “who watches the watchmen” has long been a concern of the Kremlin. Since the 1990s, the FSO has traditionally fulfilled this role and acts as the last line of defense against rival factions. According to Mark Galeotti, the FSO controls the elite Presidential Regiment of 5500 soldiers which guards the Kremlin and has its own intelligence unit to verify intelligence analysis.

I am not sure much more details on this subject could be obtained.

There is no doubt about inter-service strife, but the question remains as to whether it leads to competitive race down the ground truth -- as I proposed -- or to mere gang-style clashes. The same sources also note that:

Analysts and reporting therefore suggest the GRU’s influence is often relative to the ability of its chief to develop personal relationships with Russia’s political leadership.

and, as you said,

Russia’s President also helps foment conflict within the security services, seeing it as the best way to retain control by playing them off against each other. [...] to ensure that no single agency becomes powerful enough to threaten the regime.

Meakins also writes:

An in-depth analysis of recent episodes illustrates that crime and corruption drive much of the conflict. The desire to control illicit revenue schemes, from money laundering to smuggling, is a common cause of siloviki power struggles.

Great analysis, thank you.

I apologize if you discerned bad faith in my words, there was none of it. I explicitly admitted that “Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative [...]”.

For now I’ve googled out a few more claims about Putin’s alleged aversion-to-PC. That plus data you provided have updated me. Many asynchronous claims from rivals and subordinates alike, pointing in the same direction is improbable to fake.

I appreciate the way you and others have scrutinized every causal linkage in my story, stating that evidence X is not necessarily caused by hidden dynamics Y. It's a fair criticism, but I'd like to know what evidence, in principle, could have shifted your prior towards mine or least away from yours. Rejecting extreme cases by analogies would get us only so far. If you can't contemplate such evidence (due to nature of the question), then probably this discussion is boring for you, as I would repeatedly hit the same tiles on your epistemic map, thinking that your battleships are there, while there are none. As for me, I enjoy your counterpoints.

Here’s what Alena Ledeneva writes in "Can Russia Modernise?: Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance". The book is from 2013, but assuming a degree of institutional inertia, its findings might still be relevant.

It is tempting to think about informal power, status and influence as a pyramid, by analogy with formal power, because the power networks involved in informal governance are also vertically integrated, somewhat hierarchical and can be similarly rigid and brutal – ‘like a wolves’ pack’, in the expression of one respondent. Yet they surface in more subtle ways and involve constant and mutual monitoring by key players, including highly personalised checks and balances. According to a well-informed respondent, the monitoring function of smotryashchie (the watchers) is central for informal governance and should not be associated with some stereotypical siloviki planted everywhere to watch over businesses or projects. The checks and balances of smotryashchie emerge from Putin’s networks’ watching over one another and from their informal reporting:

In reality, smotryashchie is not a single eye. It’s a complex system. Where there is some money, there should be control. Putin controls manually. He does not trust anybody. There are checks and balances and there are trusted watchdogs. There is Rottenberg. There is Akimov. There are [the] Koval´chuks. There is Timchenko, who also starts steering (rulit´ ). 9 All these people have access to Putin through a private room in his office. Each of them has Putin’s ear and in the end he [Putin] gets a more or less adequate picture. He divides and rules. In each constituency, there are those associated with Berl Lazar and there are those associated with Adolf Shaevich.

He also uses non-sistema sources that we know nothing about. It is like the operative work of reading dossiers, morning FSB reports (utrennya spravka FSB), general country reports (obschaya spravka po strane), [and] memos (dokladnye zapiski) that come from almost everywhere. It used to be Sechin who did the reading, now it must be somebody else’s job. The operative work, however, continues as normal.

One of my respondents also observes that Putin labels people as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (svoi and chuzhie) rather harshly:

Putin takes information from svoi only. He seems unable to trust people and the delivery of information and signals-gathering occurs through siloviki but, make no mistake, they assemble it from all over the place (po shirokomu frontu).

Alexander Stubb (former prime minister, foreign minister and finance minister of Finland) recently shared his impression of Putin at Lawfare podcast. Stubb and Putin (then prime minister) participated in ceasefire negotiations in 2008. I am not going to extrapolate from this vignette, but I deem it an informative perspective from someone who has no clear incentive to praise Putin (I mean, aside from denying that he was negotiating with a moron). Starts at 11:44

Stubb: Putin at the meetings is very well prepared, he’s got his usual speaking notes and quite often he starts by reading out ...and then he starts going into real business. Interpreters at both sides are very good, so you get a sense of what’s going on. Then there’s always a rigmarole of him being late, anywhere from one hour to four hours, it’s kind of stuff you have to live with. But yeah, he’s ...analytical, he is intellectual, he’s cold, he knows his stuff. He is not a pushover as we can see.

Lawfare: [my paraphrasing] one thing is to be well prepared and to hinge solely on your initial point, but what about fluid reasoning, about ability to read others and to react in the moment?

Stubb: Listen, you don’t become a president or leader of Russia if you don’t have a cognitive capacity which goes beyond the normal. Certainly he was able to react to situation, in a very impressive way. He was able to connect the dots, he would bring in something, say, on the Middle East or Syria, he’d bring in memory from Afghanistan, make reference to Stalin. He’d talk about some details about, say, a NATO mission somewhere, missile negotiations with America, make reference to George W. Bush, to Condoleezza Rice… The guy knew his stuff […] You see the problem is, quite often we get our image, a picture, a projection of particular individual from the international media […] but certainly I would say that out of hundreds of leaders or ministers I’ve met over the years, Putin is someone who you would remember, because he’s so well versed in his dossier.

Lawfare: many in the Western media of late have been focusing on him losing his mind in some way…

Stubb: I think that’s rubbish

Lawfare: ...losing his grip. I don’t know if that’s because of covid isolation or mental decline, but [Stubb laughs]

Stubb: My take here, it’s a little bit counterintuitive to what we usually hear in the West or what you would hear from an avid transatlanticist like me […] I think some people simply don’t understand the Russian soul or the Russian mind. Russian leadership has always been very centralised […] he is rational from his perspective, but irrational from Western perspective. For him it’s about story: Great Russia, re-instituting Russia, make-Russia-great-again mentality. […] so all this stuff about long tables, him, being in a covid isolation… to be honest, I think it’s Western rubbish

[You] This is what I'm analogizing to LW mindset (again, it's not fair to dismiss that as a rhetorical device, it's a good faith reference to a phenomenon we discussed earlier). It can be called «generality hypothesis».

Analogies of the form “Not unlike folks from $outrgoup, you’re making a methodological error of” collapse diverse opinions within $outgroup and blur the line between their cluster of opinions and mine, and it's those collateral implications of the analogy I dislike. I called it a rhetorical device as your argument is perfectly valid without this wrapping.

I admit, my hypothesis is similar to Efficient Dictator Hypothesis (akin to Efficient Market not Pareto efficiency) or something like political no-arbitrage: if Putin didn't use some sort of higher-level information filtering techniques, this knowledge differential would have been exploited by his opponents and he wouldn't have survived and stayed on top of a ruthlessly competitive Kremlin environment.

[You] My null hypothesis is that ours is a (perhaps extremely) degenerate case of autocracy, that Putin is not that savvy at this autocrat thing, and owes his success at staying in power solely to narrow specializations like building a small intensely loyal mafia family and murdering key people outside it.

But what does mafia building consist in, exactly? Isn't it about managing and filtering patronage networks?

Sure he is motivated to survive: it's not clear he knows effective means to maximize his odds of survival, that's the whole problem (starting this war has done very little good for his long-term survivability, I think).

I think that the entire situation involves a great number of mistakes, generally tragic ones, by all parties. The magnitude of the mistakes varies by quite a lot, from the trivial (Zelensky's glamor magazine photo shoot) to the profound (Putin's decision to attempt the conquest of Ukraine).

In my view, Putin's decision to invade has utterly wrecked his own medium-term objectives. I believe that he wanted to elevate Russia back into the upper ranks of the Great Powers, and intended the enforcement of a Russian sphere of influence as a necessary step towards that goal. The actual effect has been to make Russia a pariah state, and hardened anti-Russian sentiment all along its borders.

Even if Ukrainian resistance collapses tomorrow, and Russian forces secure Kyiv within a week or so, the above failure remains. Putin's life's work is dead. Immediately calling a unilateral ceasefire and pulling every Russian back across the border won't revive it, either.

I feel pretty confident in my read of Putin's motives, but not confident at all in predicting his next move, since I don't see a next move that is productive from his perspective. Stall and hope for a miracle? But Russian attitudes stereotypically tend to the dour, not the optimistic.

In my view, Putin's decision to invade has utterly wrecked his own medium-term objectives.

In hindsight, I was wrong to guess in February that Russia wouldn't be foolish enough to invade. I can see how, with Ukraine drifting toward the West, this might have been their best shot at returning them to the fold. Perhaps if the thunder run on Kyiv had gone differently, or Zelenskyy had fled, defenses might have collapsed. But I don't see any real scenarios where, failing to accomplish regime change within about a week, continuing to press would do anything except start the meat grinder and drive irreconcilable wedges between Russian and Ukrainian identities. I'm not a gambling man, but I can see how that might make sense to one. Retreating after 72 hours claiming troops "got lost" or something still seemed possible, and probably would have held off the firehose of Western materiel that they're unable to counter.

Since then, I've realized that my understanding of Putin's goals and methods was flawed, although I'm not sure what they should be. The current situation seems fairly unwinnable to Russia (and I don't see mobilization changing that -- there's pretty good photographic evidence that they've been scraping near the bottom of the Soviet stockpile for a while), and I can't personally explain any action other than an orderly retreat with their tail between their legs (compare the US retreat out of Afghanistan or Vietnam)

In hindsight, I was wrong to guess in February that Russia wouldn't be foolish enough to invade.

Oh, I was completely wrong on this point as well. After Putin's adventures in Georgia and Crimea, I expected that we'd see a repeat, salami-slicing a good chunk of the Donbass, but stopping there. I was stuck in the mental mode of "the previous tactics worked, let's repeat," while it seems obvious in hindsight that Putin's thinking was more "the previous probing tactics revealed Western weakness, let's escalate" and we got the thunder run on Kyiv.

Perhaps if the thunder run on Kyiv had gone differently, or Zelenskyy had fled, defenses might have collapsed.

I think you're right that this alternate timeline gets closest to a win for Putin. The Western response in reality was a panicked economic cancellation of Russia. In the alternate "quick Russian military victory" timeline, what changes when the West is presented with the fait accompli? What's the likelihood that the West simply accepts the result, maybe with a militarized border in Poland?

There are countervailing pressures in the alternate timeline--maybe a quick Russian victory makes Putin more of a threat, accelerating the economic/diplomatic responses in the same direction, but with more urgency. Alternatively, maybe the real timeline where Russia got bogged down, showing weakness, allowed for a more vigorous economic/diplomatic response, and full economic cancellation would be seen as too risky in the "stronger Russia" timeline.

Setting aside the details of the military situation within Ukraine, I think there are two big points that Putin has hard lost in the context of European politics. The first is diplomatic, with Sweden and Finland set to join NATO. The Finnish border was never friendly, but going full NATO is a stark rejection of Putin's publicly declared preferences. The second is more cultural/economic, with the collapse of the European Green movement, and in particular German efforts to figure out an energy strategy that is reliable and diminishes Russian influence.

I do not think that the European Green movement will collapse.

Apart from total collapse, the core of the Greens are insulated middle-upper class, academics and feminists. They were not massively popular from the beginning, but they can decide on policy thanks to the support of Washington and of media-friendly popular culture.

For instance, from the beginning of the war, the popularity of the Greens in Germany only grew.

I think there are two big points that Putin has hard lost in the context of European politics

Maybe it is not much but for me reading news about polls measuring approval of Russia was hilarious. In Poland it dropped to 3%.

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