Putin’s election win is assured – here’s what his paranoia will lead him to do next

“Stalin knew how to run Russia and how to get respect. Vladimir Putin could learn something from him.” It isn’t often that you get to meet a genuine Stalinist but those words came from not just any old fan of the late Soviet dictator. With the cameras rolling on our BBC interview, they were spoken to me at a rally by his grandson, Yevgeny, sporting an impressively bushy Stalin moustache, as we stood amidst thick snow in Moscow during elections for the State Duma – Putin’s first after being appointed Russian prime minister. More than 26 years on, it seems that Putin did learn from Stalin, a leader who believed that you could never be too paranoid. Now, with Putin on course to win another big majority for his United Russia party, through manipulation and lack of real choice in this latest election, that paranoia is almost certain to bring tighter repression in Russia and increased attempts to intimidate us abroad in Britain and our European neighbours. Shorts Four-and-a-half years after launching a war on Ukraine where victory is nowhere in immediate sight, Russia’s President is living up to the dictionary definition of paranoia: a way of thinking that involves intense, irrational distrust and suspicion of other people. Putin, of course, is not Stalin. He hasn’t killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens in purges. But the paranoid logic which fuelled the terror of that Soviet period, enemies everywhere, loyalty never enough, is tightening its grip on the Kremlin. Now he has another dubious election win he should be more relaxed, but instead he will intensify the hunt for so-called traitors at home and abroad. Preliminary results show that his party has 57.83 per cent of the vote, with voter turnout at 59.32 per cent and United Russia expected to secure a record 355 seats in the lower chamber. This success will be presented as a national plebiscite on him, the war and the country’s defiance of the West. It is anything but. Even workers from the famous St Petersburg art gallery, the State Hermitage Museum housed inside the Winter Palace of the tsars, were forced to vote, promised a day off if they came to the polls and placed their cross in the right box. What could be more paranoid than worrying that you might not get high enough levels of support in a fixed election where the victory percentage was probably agreed in advance? Victory will not cure the Kremlin’s siege mentality, it will validate it. This is not paranoia as a medical diagnosis, it is paranoia as an operating system. Criticism becomes sabotage, opposition becomes foreign influence. Even now his regime is hunting down people who donated a few roubles to deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny, even though the money was given years ago when it was not illegal to do so. In a paranoid system, crimes are backdated. The next stage of Putin’s story will be the ramping up of repression by demonstration. The Kremlin does not need to arrest everybody. It just needs enough exemplary cases to force millions to police themselves. Members of an electoral commission count votes after polls close on the final day of elections to Russia’s ninth State Duma (Photo: Emil Leegunov/Anadolu via Getty Images) Putin has fallen into the dictator’s trap. Manufacture the applause, as happened in this election, and you can never be sure who means it. Even the elites, business and political, are feeling the heat. They once gave Putin their loyalty in return for being allowed to get rich. The pact is breaking down: Russian entrepreneurs are seeing more of their companies taken and redistributed by the authorities because their loyalty is in doubt. Officials are moving their families and money out of Russia because they are worried that the next mass mobilisation of young men to be sent into the Ukraine war meat grinder is on the way, and will reach even their sons, now that the election result is secured. History repeats itself. Stalin’s internal security apparatus, the NKVD, had a lethal incentive to discover conspiracies because the regime demanded enemies to be punished. Putin’s FSB operates in a far less murderous system, but it too gains power, budgets and influence by finding supposed threats. For us in Britain and the European Union, Putin’s paranoia will lead to more pressure, more acts of deniable hybrid war. We can expect further attempts to make us feel that supplying weapons to Ukraine is too expensive: cyber attacks, sabotage, intimidation and disinformation. The aim will be to persuade voters in democracies across Europe that helping Ukraine is a reckless choice and a dangerous one. How do you deal with someone paranoid if you are sitting in London, or Paris, or Berlin? We need to be firm without being dramatic. Our priorities should be to sustain Ukraine, protect vulnerable infrastructure, answer hybrid attacks with a clear response and keep diplomatic channels open. Stalin’s paranoia ended badly. His legacy of violently purging those who upset him deterred his inner circle from entering his room uninvited when he fell ill and then died. Putin’s rule may end the same way one day, his paranoia leaving him short of friends willing to come to his rescue.