Vladimir Putin must have been watching the riots in Nepal closely — and not just because they were a violent instance of “people power” or, as Putin would say, a “colored revolution.”
Of far greater concern to Russia’s illegitimate president is the mechanics of the insurrection. Nepal looked stable, and few would have expected such an outburst.
In retrospect, we can point to a variety of systemic problems — or “contradictions,” as Putin, versed in Marxism and Leninism, might say — that seemed to spell trouble: “years of simmering frustration over corruption, nepotism and broken promises in Nepal’s democratic system.” But what did spark the riots was the government’s social media ban, which outraged young Nepalese and pushed them over the edge.
Putin knows that Lenin’s newspaper was called Iskra or “Spark.” He also knows that sparks have played a critical role in many of Eastern Europe’s popular uprisings.
Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution was sparked by electoral shenanigans, as was the 2011 Russian Snow Revolution and the Belarusian mass demonstrations in 2020 to 2021. Ukraine’s 2013 to 2014 Revolution of Dignity was sparked by a bloody government crackdown on students protesting the regime’s abandonment of an association agreement with the European Union.
Putin also knows that the fall of the Berlin Wall was sparked by a misstatement by an East German Communist Party official, just as Poland’s Solidarity movement was sparked by the illegal firing of a trade union activist in the Gdansk shipyard. And Putin may know that the American Revolution was sparked by the punitive laws adopted by the British in response to the Boston Tea Party, that Iran’s revolution was sparked by the 1978 Cinema Rex fire in Abadan and that the Tunisian Revolution was sparked by the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2011.
Naturally, not every rebellion, revolution or insurrection is the result of systemic contradictions and random sparks, but there are enough examples to warrant considering this combination of factors as being on to something. The catch is that, while systemic contradictions are easy to identify, sparks cannot be predicted. They can be anything from a fire to a law to a death, and they can occur any place, at any time.
But the randomness of sparks is precisely what makes them so scary for dictators. Things may look outwardly stable, as in Nepal, but the presence of serious systemic contradictions means that dictatorial regimes are inherently vulnerable to expressions of people power. Naturally, vulnerability can be lessened by resolving systemic contradictions, were it not for the fact that such contradictions are most likely to be acute and resistant to resolution in authoritarian systems — such as Putin’s Russia — which rest on the very contradictions they create.
Russia is thus exceptionally vulnerable to an incendiary spark that could burn the house down. Skeptics who believe that Russia is immune to people power should ask themselves how likely did popular uprisings seem to be in Poland, Iran, Ukraine, Belarus and the Middle East before they actually happened.
Skeptics should also recall what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls Dornbusch’s law, named after the late German economist Rudiger Dornbusch: “The crisis takes longer to happen than you can possibly imagine, then happens quicker than you can possibly imagine.”
Putin radiates bravado, and genuinely seems to believe that his Russia is at the peak of civilizational perfection. Just how he can possibly believe this when Russia’s army is bogged down, its economy is contracting and its society is experiencing severe strains is unclear, but his blindness to reality also means that he will be less likely to notice a genuine spark when it occurs (and indeed it will occur).
Blissfully oblivious of the reality around him, Putin and his regime are especially vulnerable to popular rebellions. Russia will, someday, become Nepal.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-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, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
