Chrystia Freeland

Among old Russia hands, the smart thing to say about Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the billionaire who is running for president, is that he is a puppet of the Kremlin. He’s not a real opposition politician, the argument goes, he is merely a liberal-sounding insider who has been given Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s blessing to compete to make the race look more legitimate and to split the liberal vote.

All of this is true. But when I interviewed Prokhorov in Moscow a few days ago, I realized that it missed the most important point — what Prokhorov’s candidacy, and the man himself, tells us about the battle raging today inside the Russian governing elite.

When people take to the streets to challenge their regimes, particularly in societies that had been dismissed as apathetic, the most exciting story is the protesters. Many of them are fresh faces, and they can be painted in the idealistic colors of the outsider.

The opposition is certainly important — and it usually also has the virtue of being right. But the fate of the protest movement is very often decided not on the raucous streets where the opposition marches, but in the grim offices where the governing establishment decides how it will respond and how it can hang on to the loot it acquired while in power.

That was the case in the Soviet Union 20 years ago, when three career Communist Party officials gathered in a hunting resort in Belarus to sign the death warrant of the regime that created them. It was true of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which was led by a man who had served as prime minister and central bank chief for the president he was defying. And it was decisive last year in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak lost the support of the military.

Prokhorov’s decision to run in the presidential election in March is, in the words of the man himself, a sign that the Russian elite, too, is seriously divided.

Prokhorov made no bones about being a political neophyte and a candidate of the elite. “It’s not easy to pass all the barriers,” he said, referring to the intentionally onerous criteria a candidate must meet to contest the presidency. “You need to have more or less a green light to pass to the ballot.”

When I asked if he meant a green light from the Kremlin, Prokhorov insisted that politics at the top were more complicated. “It’s more difficult,” he said. “You need to have a green light from a majority of the Russian elite.”

But that elite, Prokhorov said, is not monolithic: “The Kremlin is not, like, one person or two people — there are wings, liberal wings and conservative wings. It’s an ongoing fight between them. This is the nature of Russia right now, that even within the parties, within the government, in the Kremlin, we have these wings. So it is a fight between the liberal and conservative wings: What is the future of Russia.”

Prokhorov said the conservative wing was “very cynical.” “They need stability at any price. And they are ready to pay any price, even instead of future development,” he said. “They are afraid of competition, they are afraid of development.”

But the liberals are ascendant: “I think that the liberal part of the elite is bigger and bigger from day to day, because I have a lot of calls from different levels, and they really express their support for my candidacy.”

These establishment liberals, of whom Prokhorov is very much one, believe “the era of managed democracy is over.” As Prokhorov said, “We now have all the pieces in place to move very fast to being a real democratic country.”

But Prokhorov wants that shift to happen by consensus within the elite. When I asked him if an Orange Revolution could happen in Russia, he was aghast.

“I am against any revolution, because I know the history of Russia. Every time we have a revolution, it was a very bloody period,” he said. “So I like very fast evolution.”

That evolution should be achieved, he believes, by a deal within the governing elite: “We need to sit at the table — the liberal wing and conservative wing. We need to sit together, to speak in a very open way, and make a decision — what is the future of Russia.”

To the leaders of the Russian protest movement, this vision of a cozy, elite-driven evolution is wishful thinking at best. Grigory Chkhartishvili, a best-selling Russian novelist who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, predicted this week that Putin would be forced out of power in March.

But even if, as in Cairo last year or Kiev in 2004, the street ultimately does triumph, the elite battles Prokhorov embodies remain critically important.

Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and opposition leader, told me these internal divisions were a reason to hope that the Kremlin did not have the stomach for severe repression.

“This option is taken very seriously in the Kremlin,” Kasparov said. “But it is all about the balance of power within the ruling elite, because now they all understand, if Putin goes, maybe 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of those who are surrounding him and making this core of the elite, they will be facing trial; they can lose money. But most of them — 80 percent at least, maybe more — will be making deals with the new government. Maybe giving up some money, but securing their fortunes. If they go into oppressive mode, then the numbers will change and any revolutionary explosion will blow them up.”

If it comes to a choice between hanging on to political power or hanging on to at least some of their Swiss bank accounts, Kasparov is betting that 80 percent of the elite will be prepared to do a deal. Prokhorov’s political debut could be a very important sign that Kasparov is right.

This has been a bad year for dictators, starting with the Arab Spring and ending now with the Russian Winter. If you are one of the autocrats who survived the annus horribilis of 2011, here are three lessons, drawn from some smart Russians and Russia-watchers, of what the unexpected Slavic protests this month could mean.

The first is that authoritarian regimes don’t run on autopilot. To survive, particularly in the age of the Internet, jet travel and global capital flows, dictatorships need to be savvy and effective. We often attribute the success of democratic revolutions to their brave leaders or the spirit of the times, but, as Lucan Way, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, argues, “authoritarian incompetence” can be an equally powerful driver.

That is certainly the case in Russia, where one reason United Russia, the party of power led by Vladimir V. Putin, did so poorly in elections this month is the simple fact that the regime made a lot of political mistakes.

“The ineffectiveness and stupid actions of the authorities have accelerated the process,” Grigory Chkhartishvili, the best-selling Moscow author who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, explained in an e-mail. He recalled asking Yegor Gaidar, the late architect of Russian economic changes, “when does he expect society to awaken. Around 2015, he answered, if they, meaning Putin and his entourage, do not make too many mistakes. Well, they have made too many mistakes.”

Vladimir Gelman, a professor of political science at the European University in St. Petersburg, made a similar point this week. Gelman argued that the Kremlin’s wobble in December was an own-goal, or, as he put it, “a blow delivered with its own hands.”

The biggest mistake, in Gelman’s view, was “the attempt to mask Russian authoritarianism with a liberal facade.” That turns out to have been an error partly because “part of the political class and concerned members of civil society actually believed in the liberalization of the regime.”

But the bigger problem was that Russia’s authoritarian leaders became so infatuated with their political Potemkin village they neglected some of the coercive basics: focused as they were on the carrot, the authorities didn’t pay enough attention to the stick. Gelman contrasts this political season, when the government’s attitude before the election was “peaceful,” with the 2007-8 political cycle, when the opposition was repressed in advance and the state’s political machinery was fully engaged.

The standout example of authoritarian competence, by contrast, is China, whose rulers have continued to focus relentlessly on doing whatever it takes to stay in power. That determination was in evidence after the “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union, which prompted a thoughtful and concerted effort to tighten government control, as did the uprisings in the Arab world this year.

The second lesson of the Russian protests is one that will be particularly worrying for China. It is that economic success does not guarantee political success. This equation is mystifying in Western democracies — where people tend to believe that “it’s the economy, stupid,” and usually they’re right.

That’s why the International Monetary Fund, which focused on Egypt’s healthy gross domestic product numbers, was wrong-footed by the protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo. And it is why the demonstrations in Russia perplexed many foreign observers, who noted that many of their participants were well-heeled members of a middle class that prospered in the Putin era.

A partial explanation of this puzzle is that, as in Tunisia and Egypt, middle-class citizens in a dictatorship can be moved to protest by their souls, not just their pocketbooks. The refrain during the Arab Spring was that the protests were about dignity. As for Russia, Chkhartishvili put it another way: “This is not about bread, this is about cleanliness. It’s not political, it’s hygienic.”

Research by Carol Graham and Stefano Pettinato suggests another reason why a prospering society might still be a rebellious one. In work that initially focused on Russia and Peru, the two identified a group they described as “frustrated achievers,” people who had become both richer and less happy.

“Frustrated achievers are people who are just out of poverty or the lower middle class,” Graham, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. “They are people who have made relatively large gains, but they report being very frustrated.”

A source of that frustration, Graham said, was when “the gains around them are much bigger than their own, and bigger than they can ever achieve in their lifetime.” Post-Soviet Russia, with its oligarchs, crony capitalism and corruption, is a petri dish for frustrated achievers.

The third lesson of the Russian Winter is one it has in common with the Arab Spring. One consequence of the rise of social media is the emergence of what Way calls “leaderless protests.”

“In Russia, as in the Arab world, protests started largely spontaneously without the participation or instigation of the major opposition groupings,” Way said in an e-mail. “Instead, they were inspired by actors who came out of nowhere and lacked virtually any kind of organizational backing.”

But this new world is also hard to manage for the would-be revolutionaries. Twitter and Facebook may make it easy to get those frustrated achievers onto the streets. But the really hard work always starts the day after the revolution, and if you didn’t need to build a protest movement in the first place, you may soon lose power to the people who did.

The next Russian Revolution started this month. It will be another two or three or even four decades before the Russian people take to the streets to overthrow their dictator — and the timing will depend more on the price of oil than on anything else — but as of Sept. 24, revolution rather than evolution became Russia’s most likely path in the medium term.

That’s because President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s announcement last weekend that he would step aside next March to allow Vladimir V. Putin to return to the Kremlin was also an announcement that the ruling clique failed to institutionalize its grip over the country.

We have known since 1996 that Russia wasn’t a democracy. We now know that Russia isn’t a dictatorship controlled by one party, one priesthood, or one dynasty. It is a regime ruled by one man.

“The party doesn’t exist,” said one of Russia’s leading independent economists. “The politics is all about one person.”

“There is no such thing as Putinism without Putin,” Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national-security studies at the US Naval War College, wrote this week in The National Interest. “Putin must still remain personally involved and at the helm for his system to function.”

That new reality might seem to be a victory for Putin. But it is a flawed triumph. His resumption of absolute power is also an admission that he and his cronies have failed in the project they set themselves in 2008. And that failure leaves the future President Putin with an Achilles’ heel.

The project was to create a self-replicating institutional base for the regime Putin brought to power in 2000, when he took over from Boris N. Yeltsin and dismantled the fledgling democratic structures the first leader of independent Russia had either created or tolerated.

“In 2008, Putin’s message was, ‘We aren’t like a Central Asian republic, we aren’t going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions,”’ Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and one of the most astute students of Russian power, told me. “This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn’t work.”

Russia’s transformation into what political scientists call a sultanistic or neo-patrimonial regime is a break both with Russian history and with the global trend. The Kremlin has been home to plenty of murderous dictators. But the czars drew their legitimacy from their blood and their faith. The general secretaries owed their power to their party and their ideology. Putin’s rule is based solely on the man himself.

Russia’s shift to sultanism is out of step with the rest of the world, too. The Arab Spring was a revolt against some of the world’s most powerful neo-sultans; it is no accident that most of the remaining Middle Eastern dictatorships are ruled by dynastic monarchs, not strongmen. And among the world’s great powers — a group to which Russia is desperate to belong — only the Kremlin’s ruler need say l’état, c’est moi. China is certainly authoritarian, but it is a one-party state of precisely the sort Putin has failed to build.

One characteristic of paternalistic regimes is that they rule through fear and humiliation — remember the refrains from the streets of Tunisia and Egypt about people protesting to regain their dignity. That is being lost in Russia. One analyst, who has always spoken to me freely before, asked not to be quoted. When I asked a Russian businessman who was traveling in Europe what his friends back home thought, he was shocked by my naïveté: Kremlin politics, he explained, was no longer an issue it was safe to discuss on Russian telephones.

The sense of humiliation is even greater. “A lot of my friends are very disappointed that the private decision of two friends can determine the fate of their great and huge country,” one oligarch from the former Soviet Union told me.

Most humiliated of all was President Medvedev, who was required to announce his abdication from the Kremlin himself. “Medvedev is now the ultimate symbol of weakness,” Krastev said. “The liberals now hate him more than they hate Putin.”

Don’t, however, expect Western business to complain. When it comes to dealing with governments, especially foreign ones, chief executives love one-stop shopping, and that’s one thing a personalistic dictatorship provides. As one European chief executive told me, “We applaud this candidacy. Putin has been supporting industry in a way that is remarkable.”

Another thing Western chief executives like about dealing with dictators is presumed stability. That’s not entirely a myth — look at Ukraine to see how turbulent a post-Soviet state can be when it experiments with democracy — but it isn’t totally true either.

Paternalistic regimes can be very strong, but they are also very brittle. They have two great vulnerabilities. The first is money. Fear and humiliation are important tools for a neo-patrimonial strongman, but he needs cash, too. A Russian economist I spoke to calculated that if the price of oil were to fall below $60 a barrel, and stay there, Putin’s reign could soon be imperiled.

The second is succession. The central problem with a regime built on one man — and a reason Putin tried to institutionalize Russian authoritarianism — is that it has no mechanism for transferring power.

“For this type of regime, the only succession is that you clone yourself,” Krastev said. “In 2008, Putin wanted to convince us that he, like Yeltsin, could retire to the dacha. Now, there is no dacha for Putin anymore. He must die in the Kremlin.”