Putin's legitimacy

 I don't see where Putin achieves legitimacy.  He can't claim succession from the Czars and besides they had religious foundation, and he can't claim ideology.  It is just maintaining power through force and creating dependencies?

Yes—with one important qualification: Putin does seek legitimacy, but not primarily through a traditional source of legitimacy such as dynastic succession or ideology. His claim is closer to performance legitimacy: I am the state, I keep Russia strong, orderly, independent, and respected; therefore my continued rule is justified.

The interesting thing is that he has assembled several older Russian sources of legitimacy without really possessing any one of them in its pure form.

The Tsarist connection is mostly symbolic. Putin doesn't claim to be the heir of the Romanovs. But he has deliberately rehabilitated pieces of the imperial tradition: the Orthodox Church, military glory, the idea of a strong centralized state, suspicion of Western encirclement, and the notion that Russia is a distinct civilization rather than simply a European nation-state. He can invoke Peter the Great, Catherine, Alexander III, and even the imperial map without claiming the throne.

Communist ideology is gone as an organizing principle. Putin isn't trying to recreate Marxism-Leninism. In fact, he has rather pointedly criticized Lenin for creating the Soviet federal structure that, in his view, ultimately permitted Ukraine and the other republics to become independent. Yet he happily appropriates Soviet symbols and, especially, the victory over Nazi Germany. The Great Patriotic War is probably the closest thing Russia has today to a genuinely shared civic mythology.

And then there is Russian nationalism, which has increasingly filled the ideological vacuum. But it is a somewhat peculiar nationalism: Russia is portrayed not merely as a country inhabited by Russians, but as a civilizational state with a legitimate sphere of influence and a historic mission. That gives the regime a justification for power beyond simply "I won the election."

But I think your formulation gets at the more fundamental point:

Putin's actual legitimacy is heavily endogenous.

He controls the machinery that produces legitimacy: elections, television, courts, parliament, political parties, regional governments, major businesses, and the security services. Elections don't have to be completely fabricated to serve this purpose. They demonstrate that the people have chosen Putin, while the political environment ensures that there isn't a realistic mechanism by which they can choose somebody else.

And dependencies are enormously important. An enormous number of Russians' livelihoods, businesses, careers, pensions, government contracts, regional budgets, media outlets and political positions ultimately depend upon the state. The regime therefore doesn't need everybody to love Putin. It needs most people to conclude that opposing him is either futile, dangerous, or personally disadvantageous.

That's rather different from the legitimacy of a medieval king who could say, God made me king, or a communist leader who could say, History has demonstrated that the Party represents the inevitable future of mankind.

Putin's implicit argument is much more pragmatic:

    Russia needs a strong state. I provide the strong state. Therefore Russia needs me.

That can be remarkably durable, but it has a weakness: the legitimacy is personalized. There isn't a particularly convincing answer to the question, Why Putin's system rather than merely Putin himself?

And that is where succession becomes interesting. A regime based on Putin's personal ability to balance oligarchs, security services, regional elites, the military, bureaucracy, nationalism and public opinion can become surprisingly brittle when the central balancing figure disappears.

So I wouldn't say Putin has no legitimacy. I'd say he has a deliberately constructed, largely performance-based and increasingly nationalist legitimacy, sitting on top of coercion and dependency. The coercion is the foundation; the mythology and performance are the façade that makes the foundation less conspicuous.

And, interestingly, that makes his regime rather different from both the Romanovs and the Soviet Union. Neither of those systems had to explain quite so much of their legitimacy in terms of the personal competence and achievements of one living man.

Performance is demonstrably missing: body bags and inflation and incoming drones.

Yes—and that's where the distinction becomes important. Performance legitimacy is not the same thing as actual good performance. It means the regime claims legitimacy on the basis of performance, and people accept or reject that claim according to what they experience.

And Putin's problem is that the bargain has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

The original implicit bargain was something like:

"You stay out of politics; I will give you stability, rising living standards, national pride, and security."

For much of the 2000s, that was a fairly effective proposition. Oil revenues rose, wages and consumption improved, the chaotic Yeltsin years receded into memory, and Russia recovered a sense of great-power status.

But the current bargain is considerably less attractive:

"You stay out of politics; I will give you war, casualties, inflation, mobilization, sanctions, and Ukrainian drones reaching Russian territory—but at least Russia is fighting the West."

That's a much harder sell.

The clever part of the regime's response is that it has changed the definition of performance. Putin doesn't have to demonstrate that Russia is prosperous and secure if he can persuade people that the relevant performance test is whether Russia is standing up to the West. A Russian civilian being killed by a Ukrainian drone can therefore be presented not as evidence that Putin failed to protect Russia, but as evidence that Russia is at war with a powerful enemy.

Likewise, casualties can become evidence of sacrifice rather than evidence of incompetence.

That's why I think nationalism has become increasingly important as the old performance bargain deteriorates. The regime is moving from:

    "Look what I have done for you."

toward:

    "Look what the enemy is doing to us, and look how bravely I am defending you."

There is another rather uncomfortable point, though. The system doesn't actually require majority enthusiasm. If, say, a substantial portion of Russians are apathetic, another substantial portion genuinely support Putin, and most of the remainder don't believe they can change anything, the regime can remain remarkably stable.

So the body bags and drones don't automatically translate into political collapse. They become dangerous when they produce something more consequential: elite defections, widespread public demoralization, refusal to cooperate, or a belief within the security apparatus that Putin can no longer protect the system that protects them.

That's why I'd distinguish three things:

Legitimacy: "Putin has the right to rule."

Acceptance: "I don't particularly like him, but I accept that he's the ruler."

Compliance: "I'm going along with him because opposing him is costly."

Putin increasingly seems to rely on the latter two rather than the first.

And that makes your original question even sharper. If you strip away performance, ideology, dynasty, and genuine democratic competition, what remains is essentially a state apparatus organized around preserving the incumbent and the interests of the people whose fortunes are tied to him.

That's a perfectly real form of political power. But I'd call it regime durability rather than legitimacy.