For more than two decades, Vladimir Putin’s compact with Russia’s business elite was straightforward: accumulate wealth, but leave politics to the Kremlin. That bargain makes billionaire industrialist Andrey Melnichenko’s unusually public reflections on Russia’s future significant. They do not amount to rebellion against President Putin. They may, however, reveal something potentially more consequential ~ anxiety within the system about whether Putinism can survive its own consequences.

Melnichenko belongs firmly to the establishment. His industrial empire has operated within Russia’s wartime economy, and he neither denounces the invasion of Ukraine nor calls for Putin’s removal. Yet the futures he envisages for Russia are uniformly troubling: subordination to China, impoverished isolation, fragmentation into competing centres of power, or transformation into a permanently militarised fortress. His preferred alternative is a sovereign but more open and institutionally governed Russia, capable of restoring prosperity and normal relations abroad.

The contradiction is revealing. Such a Russia would require stronger institutions, predictable laws, greater economic openness and some dispersal of political authority. These are precisely what increasingly........

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