Key Points and Summary – Vladimir Putin’s regime is “brittle” and “headless,” not strong. Evidence for this includes the “overheated” reaction of jailing 18-year-old singer Naoko for an anti-Putin song, which the author calls the act of a “fraidy cat.”
-This is compounded by influential philosopher Aleksandr Dugin—a Putin ally—comparing modern Russia to a “headless chicken” like the “ill-fated” Soviet Union before its collapse.
Russia’s President Putin Sitting at a Desk. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-As fear of the regime fades, evidenced by growing working-class dissent, Putin’s “macho” image is crumbling, suggesting Russia may be “on the brink” of disintegration.
Putin’s Russia Might Be on the Brink?
Is Russia’s fearsome fascist dictator really just a fraidy cat?
According to veteran Russia watcher James Brooke, the answer is yes.
How else is one to explain his overheated response to teenagers singing, “When the tsar dies, we’ll dance again. The old man still clings to his throne, afraid to let go.”
“Punishment for such blasphemy was immediate,” writes Brooke. “Each band member won 12 days in jail for obstructing pedestrians. The leader, 18-year-old Diana Loginova, who performs under the name Naoko, faces additional charges of ‘discrediting’ Russia’s military.”
Here’s Brooke’s zinger: “By definition, a strong man does not tremble at the sight of teenage girls singing in the streets.”
But here’s a second conclusion: By definition, teenage girls don’t risk jail if they’re truly afraid. And the fact that hundreds of young St. Petersburgers came to hear Naoko’s anti-Putin lyrics testifies to the fact that Russians may finally be waking up to the reality of Putin’s crumbling dictatorship and deciding that they are not the voiceless sheep the Kremlin believes them to be.
It would obviously be way too premature to interpret Naoko’s performance as the beginning of the end of the Putin regime.
But it would be equally incorrect to dismiss the event as meaningless—especially as young Russians may not be the only ones who see past Putin’s bluster and bravado.
The highly influential Russian imperialist and supremacist philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin—whose ideas are said to influence Putin’s—recently published a statement that should have sent shivers down Putin’s spine:
“When a chicken’s head is cut off, it keeps running. When a country, a society, an industry loses its purpose, they continue to do everything they did before. But it’s not quite the same anymore. The USSR during perestroika was also such a headless run. There was still the all-powerful Politburo, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a strategic triad, complete control over vast territories, including Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova, the Baltics …. Everything was under control. But there was no head. There was the KGB. But no head, alas. The last years of the Russian Empire were the same. There was a Tsar, but no brains, alas. Somehow I feel like something similar is coming at us.”
Note that both Naoko and Dugin refer to Putin as a weak and has-been tsar, one ready to be dumped unceremoniously onto what Soviet propagandists called the ash heap of history.
Note also Dugin’s comparison of today’s Russia with the ill-fated Soviet Union. The implication is obvious: Putin’s headless Russia is headed for collapse.
Dictatorship works only if people are afraid of criticizing it openly. Once that fear is gone, dictators are revealed as emperors with no clothes, the awe with which they were once regarded falls away, and all they can do is rely on oppression and repression—which, as people’s loss of fear demonstrates, no longer works.
Putin’s Image Problem?
The image of Putin as a weak, decrepit, and clueless autocrat is especially damaging.
Putin has, from the very start of his rule in 1999, portrayed himself as a virile, powerful, and vigorous macho—a man’s man and a ladies’ man all in one.
Having become old and puffy-faced, he no longer looks like a man who would stand knee-deep in water while bare-chested and brandishing a rifle.
To be compared to Nicholas II, a nice, though weak man who was overwhelmed by the Great War and Russia’s disintegration, is the ultimate indignity for Putin, who promised to make Russia great, and not groveling again.
Putin’s “ridiculous” war against Ukraine (the adjective is Donald Trump’s) only adds insult to injury, as Russians appear to be increasingly willing to say no.
According to one Jamestown Foundation analyst, “Human rights activists in Russia believe that the actual number of political prisoners serving time for anti-war views in Russia may be several times larger than is known to human rights organizations. Russia’s political prisoners increasingly come from non-political, working-class backgrounds…. The existence of such political prisoners and dissent against the war shows that real information about what is happening on the front is penetrating to all levels of the Russian population despite government censorship.”
What Happens Now to Russia?
Is Russia on the brink of collapse? We don’t know, of course.
That said, the Soviet Union’s inglorious end, like that of every European empire, warns us against blithely assuming that big states are immune to disintegration.
Naoko, Dugin, and Russian political prisoners suggest that Putin and his Russia may be far less stable than Kremlin propaganda would have us believe.
Indeed, Russia may very well be on the brink of something beyond the headless Putin’s control.
Whether chicken or cat, it’s fraidy with cause.
About the Author: Dr. Alexander Motyl, Rutgers University
Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”
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Swamplaw Yankee
October 31, 2025 at 2:26 am
One notices the absolute lack of op-ed from Ukrainians in the USA. Where are they when op-ed needs them? Motyl is one of the rare Ukrainians that fills a need in the Yankee op-ed.
However: Yes, that however. Can Ukrainians inside the USA actually perceive what the anglo-saxon or any ethnic component is up to? Then, are the Ukrainians inside the USA still living in/with fear?
In Canada, Ukrainians had RCMP fear. The RCMP had set up a machine gun in one village with Ukrainians to Machine gun Ukrainians out in the one street speaking some “foreign” language. The anglo-saxon federal government invented the modern concentration camp for Ukrainians situated right inside/ close to the freak show of the annual Toronto CNE midway.
Today, their MAGA POTUS Trump seems unable or incapable to deal with the legacy of his POTUS Obama moral turpitude. In 2014 the POTUS Obama Democrat Cabal had to understand the decades of Kremlin collusion that the NAZI-like FSB was perpetrating inside the Ukraine. In 2014 the Yankee chance to save Ukraine from the Kremlin ruuzzkie Genocide machine was betrayed by POTUS Obama. In 2014 the POTUS Obama Democrat Cabal unilaterally, covertly, green lit the geopolitical loss to NATO of the Ukraine’s Crimea ancient soil, Families and Black/Azov Sea jurisdictional zones to the prime vile Cold War enemy of the WEST, Kremlin ruuzzkie Putin.
So, what does the MSM hear from Ukrainian Americans about this vile deed? Afraid so, zero. That whole pre + post minsk era in Ukraine just gets reduced to the Balkan war treatment. The emotional ability of US citizens to deal with the details seems 100% absent. The 2025 US citizen can not explain one event or the other.
Its OK for POTUS Clinton to bomb the PRC CCP embassy but as OK for the POTUS Obama to green light the re-start of the 1000 year old Genocide of Ukrainians by muscovy progeny of sex-slave traders. Whatsa diff?
In 2014 PUTIN was stoppable. in 2025 the PRC CCP Xi regime has it’s WW3 agenda so far financed ahead, that there exist no US leaders able to even admit to the electors that 2014 POTUS Obama betrayed NATO and the WEST. That the Genocide of Ukrainians is a sideshow for Putin’s genetic need to kill Ukrainians as this distracts the US from its cowardice to address the start by the PRC CCP of WW3.
Coward leaders of the EU empire push each other as they try to avoid spending the level of cash needed NOW in the Ukraine to fight the PRC CCP war machine in the Axis of Evil. MAGA POTUS of the Yankee empire scares them all as he hide his nation of cowards cowering behind the few Ukrainian Fathers fighting for their existential lives. Trump pretends he is POTUS FDR of 1939 hiding his tens of millions of cowards behind Canadian kids pushed out to fight the Kremlin ruuzzkie- Nazi machine! These cowards hid behind FDR for years as the West battled the Kremlin ruuzzkie-Nazi Cabal.
Today, the EU leaders shake as they see Trump hide tens of millions of Yankee cowards behind the few Ukrainians fighting the billion plus, yes BILLION plus, humans that supply the vast military hardware that PRC CPP Xi regime ships to its vassal Putin. The EU heads know that PUTIN has the might of the PRC CCP funding him. When Trump idiotically kills off the Ukrainians, donates Ukrainian land to the mortal enemy of the WEST, where will Putin’s Xi Machine invade next, in just months?
Ukrainian in the diaspora of the USA should speak out today, way before their ancient Ukrainian soil is glibly sold out by POTUS code talkers, lying in code talk that they want peace when they are prepared to sell out Ukraine rather than fight as if they were in the USMC. Or, Ukrainians in the US vanish, quick fade out of reality. -30-