August 29, 2026: The Ukraine War, now in its fifth year, has cost over two trillion dollars, and that could grow to nearly three trillion before it ends. The annual Russian GDP is $2.6 trillion. Russian spending on civilian needs, like infrastructure, roads and much else, has been reduced, or sometimes suspended, to pay for the war. It has reached the point where many Russians, including media commentators, are talking about the possibility of another revolution like the one in 1917 that resulted in the Soviet Union. That process cost Russia about ten million dead soldiers and civilians. World War II was even worse, with 29 million dead, about 13 percent of the pre-war population. Most Russians are unhappy with their government, but do not see another 1917 as a realistic cure for the current mess.

The current crisis did not happen by plan. Russia has refused to face the fact that when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, half the population willingly moved to the 14 new countries, and most of them were enthusiastic about ending the Soviet Union and its domination. The Soviet Union was basically the Russian Empire cobbled together by the old czarist monarchy over more than two centuries of conquest and expansion. Thus, half the Soviet Union population felt like conquered people, not part of any union. The Soviet Union dissolved quickly in 1990-91 because over half the population really wanted it to happen and had wanted it for a long time.

Another issue Russian leader Vladimir Putin ignored was that many ethnic Russians were tired of supporting a lot of the less affluent conquered people and were fed up with the economic failures of communism. Former Soviet Union citizens who regret the breakup tend to be older and disillusioned by how corruption and bad leadership made post-Soviet life less wonderful than expected. Many younger Russians are more realistic, having never lived as adults in the Soviet Union and being intimately familiar with the fact that freedom isn’t free and democracy is difficult to maintain. Putin gained some support for his new empire by using his control of Russian mass media to push the idea that any economic problems inside Russia were not the fault of Russians but evil foreigners, especially the United States. That worked until the Ukraine misadventure, when these younger fans noted that none of the other former portions of the Soviet Union answered Putin’s call to send troops to share the glory in Ukraine. Even Belarus, considered the most pro-Russia of the 14 new nations formed by the half of the Soviet population that was free of Russia since 1991. These former Soviet provinces were more pragmatic and accurate in assessing Russian performance in Syria and Libya, as well as Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions.

For younger Russians, there are more economic opportunities than under communism. While Russia lost half its population in 1991, it retained most of its valuable natural resources, like oil and natural gas, which meant more prosperity for post-Soviet Russians. In Soviet times, there was little legal economic opportunity for anyone, and most everyone was equally poor. The Putin solution is a police state with a relatively free market. In the 20th century, this became known as fascism, and that describes most of the foes the Soviet Union and its western allies faced and defeated during World War II. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Communist Party that won power in Russia after World War I, experimented with this idea in the early 1920s, but then he died. His successor, Josef Stalin, faced opposition from many communist leaders who agreed with Lenin's idea of more economic freedom to build a more productive economy. Stalin was concerned about power, not prosperity, and used that to depict his many real or suspected political opponents as traitors to the communist cause and killed or exiled most of them before World War II.

Stalin died eight years after World War II ended, and his successors agreed on purging (often killing) all the officials considered true believers in Stalin’s brutal methods. The successors ignored or were not aware of how inefficient the pure communist command (state-controlled) economy was. That made it worse, and by the 1980s it was obvious to Russian leaders that they were going bankrupt and unable to sustain the Soviet state much longer. The Russian people were suffering a lot more than their corrupt leaders, and by 1990, they were refusing to go along with the communist leadership.

This is a common pattern in dictatorships, including monarchies, and Soviet leaders, like the Tsar overthrown in 1917, did not realize how bad their situation was until it was too late. Putin turned the post-Soviet democracy into a police state pretending to be a democracy with him as the leader-for-life. His failures with the economy, democracy, and now Ukraine leave Putin with more enemies than allies at all levels of Russian society, including the government and security forces. Putin still retains the power to order the use of nuclear weapons, but no fading dictator ever tried to use these weapons to retain power, and the Russian nukes cannot literally be used by one person. Bureaucracies, procedures, and safeguards must be followed to use the nukes. As was demonstrated during the 1980s, there are Russians in that bureaucracy who will not automatically carry out orders to use nukes. Russians at all levels are talking about this, most of them openly. Those closer to Putin must be discreet to survive. They want to survive, and most Russians agree, and Putin has become one of the obstacles to Russian security rather than a trusted guardian of it.