Opinion: Is Russia becoming a dictatorship?

Mark Galeotti - Putin may want to be a modern-day Soviet commissar but the rise of the internet and the willingness of the Russian people to challenge the state means it prove to be very difficult, says Professor Mark Galeotti (UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies). Is Russia heading for dictatorship? Some would think it is already there, but even today there are still some remnants of a civil society and constitutionalism. It is harder to believe they will last for long though. For a long time, Vladimir Putin's regime was something of a post-modern authoritarianism that in the main relied not so much on fear and force as control of the narrative and occasional, measured applications of prophylactic repression. Back in the 2000s and even 2010s the elections were rigged, but the real trick was to allow opposition parties and candidates who were, in the main, so personally unsavoury and politically unattractive that while the scale of Putin's victories was exaggerated, they were not wholly fictitious. Meanwhile, there was a strikingly vibrant grassroots civil society that was allowed to campaign, so long as it focused on local and specific issues rather than national politics, and even a lively and critical media. For most, the system was at once receptive enough not to arouse their anger, yet distant and dangerous enough not to encourage them into politics.