Do heavy human losses put pressure on an autocratic leader like Putin?

Question

In democratic countries, there tends to be great aversion to loss of life from military operations, and there are checks and balances that ensure a displeased populace has some capacity to vote in other candidates.

Former Australian Army General, Mick Ryan, says:

(Putin)'s certainly going to come under increased domestic pressure. He didn't level with the Russian people before this war and is still trying to hide many aspects of it from his own people.

But he will not be able to hide the increasing number of coffins from the young soldiers that will be coming home in their hundreds or thousands; that will put huge pressure on Putin.

Every autocrat has to look over his shoulder ... the pressure he will get from the Russian people, and indeed, from people in senior military and government positions, he will have to respond to that in some way.

From my limited historical knowledge of Putin and other autocrats, they do not seem to be affected by vast maltreatment of their citizenry, including causing high rates of unjustified deaths.

It therefore raises the question: do high human losses in war actually affect the job security of the head of state of an autocracy like Russia?

Answer 1

Almost all governments, both autocratic and democratic, rely on the non-resistance of the vast majority of the population. Even in a democracy, you will find a significant number of people who are neither for the government nor against it, they simply go along with the powers that be. The same kind of people go along with autocracies. Both a democracy and an autocracy will topple if those masses "wake up" and demand change. Compelling non-resistance out of the barrel of a gun takes more secret policemen than a state can afford for long. Compelling it out of fear of the secret police takes slightly fewer people, but it still takes significant resources.

In Russia's specific case, there is the Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, which the Russian government does not like in particular. But it contains too many peoples' mothers and grandmothers to lock them all up quietly. The Soldiers' Mothers remind contemporary Russians of the Afghanistan quagmire, which contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Answer 2

They can. However, historically, this pressure has almost never been significant enough to bring an immediate change of the government's course even in democracies.

The Vietnam War committed 3,000,000 Americans, left 60,000 of them dead, and killed ~2 million in total. The losses were obvious and highly publicized. The US is generally considered a democracy. Vietnam wasn't of any special significance to the American people.

The anti-war protests started in 1964. By 1967, the war was highly unpopular. In 1968, the president changed, but still didn't end the war. Overall, it took 12 years of warfare and 9 years of protests, with 6 of them widespread, to get someone to run on an anti-war platform again, win on it, and actually end the war in 1973.

For a war that is fought over something important, like a country that is of particular cultural or defensive significance to the belligerent, the threshold in losses that would turn the public opinion against the war is likely to be higher.

For an autocratic regime to step down, the threshold in both losses and protests is likely to be higher than for a democratic election to tilt towards the anti-war candidate.

The cost of a forceful takedown of an autocratic regime - a revolution - is extreme. The Russian Revolution took about 10 million lives. A new revolution might be less bloody. However, even the bloodless 1991 revolution in Russia resulted in a population reduction of 2 million over the next decade, and 5 million if time lag is accounted for.

From a strictly practical standpoint, this means that a revolution is only justified for the population if the expected losses from continuing the foreign war are even higher. World War I, largely responsible for the Russian Revolution, hit the Russian Empire with 2 million casualties, but was feared to cause a lot more. In strategic terms, the revolution ended up causing more harm than it prevented, including in territorial losses.

Some of the 1990s effect will happen in Russia either way due to the sanctions and corresponding economic downturn. Estimating this loss at 2 million, versus 5 million for a repeat of the 1991 revolution, would arrive at a threshold of ~3 million as intolerable.

//P.S. Cold math aside, I would hope it doesn't come to that. For modern wars, civilian casualties tend to exceed military ones, so you'd be looking at 8-figure total deaths in that scenario.

Answer 3

Sometimes human losses put pressure on autocrats (see other answers), but sometimes not so much. As a school child I lived in USSR and can testify that George Orwell's 1984 is almost a documentary, as far as human behavior in a totalitarian regime goes.

In particular, I have doubts that Russia would rise en masse, for it has a history of epic suffering that led to only increased obedience, almost in a Stockholm Syndrome fashion. All Russian autocrats needed to do was to convince the population that the war they war waging was righteous, or that the hunger they were suffering was unavoidable, or that the millions being persecuted were traitor, something like that. When the autocrat has a complete control over information and perspective he directs human minds sufficiently well to ensure 90% support.

Putin's propaganda machine is well aligned with what his predecessors were doing. He has full control of the domestic media, he brands foreign media as "foreign agents" (read "provocateurs out to get us Russians"), he persecutes anyone who as much as doubts the official line, etc. For crying out loud, they just denounced Facebook as a terrorist organization! Most relevantly, the relentless propaganda machines brands Ukrainians as Nazis, including their Jewish president, and parallels the invasion of Ukraine with the righteous WWII against Nazis. There is no need for truth or logic or consistency in propaganda: if that's the only thing you are allowed to believe that's what 90% will believe, and the others will shut up out of fear, for the most part.

And, if Russians were to believe the propaganda, the body count is not that bad. USSR lost over 20 million in WWII. Brainwashing the population into accepting that this is the same would make losses in tens of thousands rather mild. So it is quite possible for a totalitarian autocrat to maintain support despite heavy losses. The analogy is not quite on point, for WWII was defensive and the war on Ukraine was an aggression, but recall that Soviet invasions of, say, Finland didn't produce any dissent, despite the unexpected heavy losses, which were even higher than in Ukraine today.

The hope here is that today's Russia, despite the autocracy, is not quite as totalitarian as USSR was. There is certain amount of information coming in; many people have travelled; many have relatives oversees they can talk to. Putin would have more difficulty dismissing the body count than Stalin did with Finland or Brezhnev did with Afghanistan. Nevertheless, with the relentless brainwashing by Russian media the body count alone won't be sufficient to topple him.

On the other hand, a defeat in Ukraine is likely to end his rule: that would demonstrate to his people that he is not as omnipotent and infallible as the Russian media claims he is. IMHO that's the reason he won't withdraw very easily, not without sufficient concessions from Ukraine that would allow him to declare victory domestically. Tens of thousands dead Russian soldier are less dangerous to his rule than a publicly acknowledged defeat.

Answer 4

Yes.

Two examples that come to mind are the Falklands War, which was launched by Argentina's then military junta. They were gone soon after losing it.

Another is the USSR's long quagmire in Afghanistan. While it is certainly not the only thing that started the regime on the road to collapse, the timing, ending in 1989, after 30k deaths, coincides very neatly with the USSR's end.

In neither case were those governments directly threatened or impacted from the outside as a result of losing their wars - this was purely internal repercussions.

These regimes often tie their image down to strength and national honor which reduces their appeal when they lose, including to the armed forces who they depend on for power. Yes, a democratic government might very well lose an election after military setbacks, but a change of government is an integral part of democracies and the antithesis of totalitarian regimes.

Khrushchev was also ousted 2 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wikipedia doesn't list as a factor for his removal but it "can't have helped": Soviet Premiers served for a long time, normally. This is a case of a loss-of-face rather than loss-of-lives, but the idea remains that botched foreign adventures can be costly.

Last, in the case of Putin, unlike the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, some/many of these deaths are going to be draftees. Whatever you think of America's foreign wars, the people fighting them had chosen soldiering as a profession (which was not true in Vietnam which also had more political cost).

p.s. Maybe I'm giving the impression that it's always a problem. It isn't: China took massive losses in the Korean War and Mao did just fine. Let's say instead that it can fragilize an already tipsy leader. In Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang and Halliday, Mao-haters extraordinaire, claim that the war was an opportunity to send dissidents and opponents to the front lines and get them killed.

Cuba also had some foreign interventions during the Cold War. Castro lived it out.

Answer 5

Usually the only thing that puts pressure on autocrats is men with guns, not the general public. Taking Russia's own history since the early 20th century:

• The War of 1905 against Japan resulted in a humiliating victory with massive losses but it wasn't enough to dislodge Alexander II from power
• World War I was extremely costly to Russia as well but this alone wasn't enough to cause the downfall of the czar
• The Russian Revolution took several years and resulted in millions dead. It was driven by men with guns, not by common folk peacefully opposing the regime.
• World War II resulted in 20+ million Russians dead but Stalin still remained in power until his death
• The War in Afghanistan was another humiliation for Russia but the dissolution of the Soviet Union ended up primarily driven by low oil prices and Gorbachev's unwillingness to use the armed forces to brutally suppress the breakaway republics. If someone like Putin was in charge back in 1989 instead of Gorbachov, things might've ended up completely differently for the Baltic countries and in turn other republics would have a much harder time leaving the Union.
• The First Chechen War resulted in Russia losing 5,000+ soldiers and Chechnya becoming defacto independent but Boris Yeltsin still won the 1996 elections. Note that Yeltsin wasn't planning to give up power peacefully - his backup plan was to declare a state of emergency and cancel the elections, so its quite possible that Zyuganov would've simply been jailed and denied the Presidency if the election went against Yeltsin.
• The Second Chechen War resulted in 16,000+ casualties for the Russians but Putin still won the next elections easily.

Would the war in Ukraine be any different? This will be decided by men willing to take up arms against Putin, not the general populace. If his generals or closest advisors decide to arrest Putin, he is likely to lose power. If a violent enough protest emerges in Russia that the armed forces cannot stop, he will likewise be removed from the top. But other than that public opinion is irrelevant to Putin's hold on power and no amount of casualties in Ukraine could possibly change that.

Power is derived from monopoly on violence and only those holding the means to conduct violence can thus take up power. In rare cases in human history the power transfer was relatively peaceful (see the Velvet Revolution) but these are exceptional situations rather than the norm.

Answer 6

Of course human losses put a pressure on an autocratic regime. This is just an example.

However in an autocratic regime since most of the information is strictly controlled , it is very difficult to know how strong is the impact on the stability of the regime, and what is their capacity to withstand the impact.

Answer 7

No monarch rules alone. There is a group behind V.Putin whom he represents. Groups usually have less fixation and sticking to beliefs than individuals do.

Unfortunately, the interests of the group in power may not be perfectly aligned with the interests of soldiers dying in the battlefield or the interests of ordinary citizens who will suffer from the sanctions first. Still they likely do not want to weaken Russia, they started the war with the intention to make Russia more powerful.

As soon as they realize that friendly Russia is actually more powerful, they may think about stopping that nonsense. Without all economic sanctions that are now placed, with memberships now lost, with the respect from the world that lasted for 77 years and is now gone, with multiple international companies investing into they business there, could it be so that it was actually stronger, more powerful, more respected? Trying to imagine myself as a Russian nationalist that thinks about Russian safety and power, only Russian safety and power, nothing else that about Russian safety and power, I would still think now seriously that are the most optimal ways to achieve this.