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Early last year, Julian Waller wrote “Public Politics in the Wartime Russian Dictatorship” for War on the Rocks, in which he argues that Russia is becoming a regime that is “being outflanked and carefully challenged by a diverse set of ‘patriotic’ voices who are making open, public claims to political legitimacy and a place in the decision-influencing arena.” A year later, in the wake of President Putin’s fifth election victory, we asked him to look back on his article.Read more below.Photo Credit: Russian Ministry of DefenseIn your article “Public Politics in the Wartime Russian Dictatorship” written in Jan. 2023, you argue that Russia is becoming “a regime in which its legacy elite are quickly being outflanked and carefully challenged by a diverse set of ‘patriotic’ voices who are making open, public claims to political legitimacy and a place in the decision-influencing arena.” Have such voices successfully challenged the Russian political status quo since you wrote this piece? How have things changed, if at all, over the last year since the article was published?Although Russia has remained a closed dictatorship in a state of exception since 2022, the overall thesis that a form of public politics had returned to the country has remained clearly relevant and useful. Since Jan. 2023, we have observed a variety of political and political-military events that support the need to take seriously Russia’s internal — and sometimes oddly dynamic — authoritarian politics.Since the article’s publication, and to take just a few examples, we saw the major phases and subsequent conclusion of the Battle of Bakhmut, the demotion of Chief of the Air and Space Forces Gen. Sergei Surovikin and the “revanche” of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov to the heights of Russia’s de facto wartime command, the precipitous decline in relations between the Ministry