"Putin's Getting Older, The Divide Is Growing."
- 24.04.2026, 9:14
The world media are writing about the risk of a repeat of the 1917 revolution in Russia.
The world media are actively discussing the words of the Russian Communist leader and Kremlin-loyal propagandists: if Putin does not take urgent economic and political measures, in the fall Russia will face what happened in 1917 - a fierce civil war and disintegration of the country, writes The Times.
In recent days, there has been a swathe of reports on several levels, from the words of the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, spoken from the rostrum of the State Duma, to the propagandists of the Vladimir Soloviev pool.
The occasion for the speech was a scandalous video by the blogger Victoria Boni from Monaco: 18 minutes of grievances against the government that racked up 30 million views in a week. She claimed that the people are afraid of him and officials are hiding real problems from the president.
Putin aging, split growing
Russian Kremlin expert Tatiana Stanovaya writes that "Putin, who is aging and alienating himself from the people," risks losing control amid an internal split caused, among other things, by online repression.
"He can neither make peace with Ukraine nor win a war. Nobody needs a weak Putin, including the power structures," she quoted from her essay for the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Context
The 1917 historical collapse of imperial Russia was the result of a critical breakdown in communication between the throne and society. Nicholas II, based on notions of monarchy, lost touch with reality, which created a vacuum of legitimacy. When the administrative vertical ceased to respond adequately to the demands of the population and elites, there was an institutional collapse that led to the collapse of statehood and civil war. All this happened against the background of Russia's participation in the protracted World War I.
Today's risks of repetition are associated with a similar narrowing of feedback channels and concentration of power in a closed circuit. The parallel can be traced in the formation of ideological isolation, where managerial decisions are made on the basis of the internal logic of the system, rather than real social processes.
In conditions of such autonomization of power from society, any large-scale crisis can provoke a sharp loss of controllability, turning the accumulated social alienation into a factor of systemic disintegration.