Chrystia Freeland writes:   In our sanitised, public relations-conscious age, Vladimir Putin’s chauvinistic bluster has been bizarrely compelling. For a while, that unaccustomed spectacle concealed the profound brittleness of his regime, at least from some. Now the cracks are showing. The immediate causes are western sanctions and the lower price of oil but Russia’s fragility runs much deeper.

Mr Putin came to power on the strength of a promise: that it was possible to rule like Joseph Stalin but live like Roman Abramovich. The arrangement suited almost everyone. Mr Putin and his KGB cronies were able to rebuild a softer version of the authoritarianism they had yearned for since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s economic elites — Mr Putin’s coterie from the “power ministries” in Moscow and the oligarchs of the Boris Yeltsin era who were smart enough to play along — enjoyed vast wealth. Thanks to rising commodity prices, Russia’s urban middle class became richer, too.

Even the liberal intelligentsia, the only group that was openly disgruntled with its lot, could avail itself of a safety valve. In clever contrast with the Soviet Union, Mr Putin’s managed democracy kept its borders open, allowing potential dissidents to find homes in more congenial places..

Mr Putin is an authoritarian ruler,,  but he reigns without a governing ideology or an organised revolutionary party. His invocations of Russian nationalism have a certain rhetorical flair but they are merely the populist packaging for a system that is “capitalism for friends”.  They are rich now, wear Italian suits and Swiss watches, and no longer have an inferiority complex.

Mr Putin’s crony capitalists got rich, but they did so by looting Russia’s natural resources and borrowing against that booty with the help of accommodating western bankers. The double shock of western sanctions and a lower oil price has brought that arrangement to a halt. The greatest damage is internal. Russia’s kleptocrats and its upper middle class prospered during the Putin era, and most of these beneficiaries did not think too hard about the sources of their wealth.

Mr Putin’s nationalist bluster is no consolation at all for these Russians who, over the past two decades, had come to take a rising standard of living and integration into the west for granted. The rouble crashed precipitously in part because this group, which includes most of the country’s richest business leaders, is cashing out.
That is the problem with capitalism for friends — it earns you fair-weather allies. Their defection does not mean that Mr Putin is entirely declawed. Part of his appeal for the kleptocrats was his ability, in contrast with the politicians of the liberal intelligentsia, to craft a persona that appealed to poorer, older Russians and to those who live outside the big cities.

As the economic costs of Mr Putin’s Crimea gambit mount, he may try to pivot from kleptocracy to populist autarky. Such a shift would be economically ruinous in the long run, but in the short run it could make Russia even more aggressive and unpredictable.  Russia today is divided and in decline. The right parallel is not with the cold war. It is with the decaying Soviet Union of the 1980s.