English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (famous for the phrase “In the state of nature, the life of man would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”) believed that people only had the right to rebel against a government when that government threatened them with death. This has generally, and wrongly, been interpreted as Hobbes supporting dictatorship. It was not, as someone who had lived through the English Civil War, Hobbes believed that the only thing worse than civil war was death.
One reason why Russians have tolerated Putin for so long is that life under Putin has been better than civil war or revolution. Russian history and literature is full of the perils and horror of revolution and civil war. With Putin’s mobilisation he has tipped the scales towards revolution and civil war. While we all long for his demise, we need to consider too what will follow, a putsch where he could be replaced by one of his cronies or by a democrat — who may or may not govern democratically, a revolution which replaces Putin with another despot (history is full of these) or a revolution leading to a democracy (history is all but absent of these), or a collapse of the Russian Federation as we know it.
Russia consists of over 100 ethnicities. Many of these have seen the brunt of fighting in Ukraine. They are resentful and Putin has destroyed the military capability of his army. He can no longer keep the Russian Federation federated by threat of force. These states are likely to become independent – we will then have to deal with dozens of small countries, some of them are likely to attempt to renew old conflicts – as we are seeing in other areas of Post-Soviet space today such as conflicts between Azerbaijan with Armenia, and Uzbekistan with Tajikistan. This might include use of old arsenals from the Soviet days including attempts to use or sell nuclear arms, probably as dirty bombs. Nuclear proliferation is going to be a serious problem.
However, despite the potential disaster of a wholesale collapse of the Russian Federation – it is hard to conceive of anything worse than what we have right now. The attempted murder of a military enlistment officer and the killing of Darya Dugina may indicate the start of a more serious resistance movement within the Russian Federation. Russians have been attacking military enlistment offices since the start of the war and have derailed trains. This attempted assassination shows the next step in the collapse of the system.
However, much of the 19th century in Russia was taken up with repression of revolutionary movements that engaged in terrorism and assassinations – so a couple of assassinations could be meaningless. However, combined with a depleted army and a highly unsuccessful war we are looking at a situation similar to what we witnessed in 1917.