THREAD 1/7 Putin is afraid of ushering in a perestroika 2.0 that could repeat the mistakes of Mikhail Gorbachev’s sweeping reform policy. In this article I explain why Putin has chosen the option of staying in power after 2024. tinyurl.com/y4rtoahy 
2/7 Putin isn’t a hard-line conspiracy theorist who believes that Gorbachev deliberately made a pact with the West to bring the country crashing down. Rather, he likely shares the view that Gorbachev failed to protect the country’s core institutions as crisis overtook it.
3/7 Putin & many of his advisers know some kind of reform is needed, just as it was in 1985. But Gorbachev and his team lost control of the process that they had started, and Putin fears losing control of the political processes he & his close advisers have charted for 2024.
4/7 As far as Putin was concerned, the main danger lay in handing over power to a person who could not, in his view, be relied upon to keep Russia stable. Loyal as he was, Medvedev looked increasingly comfortable in exercising some of the prerogatives of the presidential post.
5/7 The tandem gave the ever-menacing West an opportunity to destabilize Russia by flattering and winning over one half of the power structure. This half, the so-called “reform camp,” would be courted by the West while the other, Putin’s “conservative camp,” would be reviled.
6/7 The biggest difference between Putin’s Russia and that of Yeltsin, his patron and predecessor, is that Putin fears and rejects the West. Yeltsin saw the end of the Soviet Union as liberation and the West as a partner.
7/7 But Putin seeks a reincarnation of the union, not so much in economic or political terms as in geopolitical ones—with Russia representing the polar opposite of the West. tinyurl.com/y4rtoahy
