You have all the powers that Putin currently does. Everyone completely loyal to Putin is now loyal to you. Enemies of Putin are enemies of you. Putin no longer exists, and there has been a clean and absolute transfer of power to you. The economic, military, social and political situations are the same as they now are. You are not inhabiting Putin’s body, you are just you. You’re magically transferred to the Kremlin. The world at large doesn’t know your past life, to them you have magically appeared as the new ruler. To everyone who knew you before, you just vanished.
Edit: no one knows your past life YET. They’ll quickly figure it out. You will not lose any support based on your actions in your past life.
Try to learn Russian really quickly.
- Give Volodymyr a call
- Pull out of Ukraine and Georgia
- Hand over Putin to ICC
- Instruct the loyalists that democratic reform is coming, and nobody is to be given the window/tea treatment.
- Call Navalnys widow and tell her to prepare her political aparatus
- Announce an election in 6 months (should be enough to prepare everything, I guess?) with international observers encouraged to participate
- Realize that I have no fucking idea how to ensure that elections on that scale are free and fair, so I ask for assistance from aforementioned observers.
- Pull an epic prank on Lukashenko. Possibly involving potatoes.
- Realize that I am in no way fit to run a country, and start planning my (safe) exit. Once the election results are in I’ll be gone without a trace.
- Repeal putins laws
- Start releasing political prisoners
- Last thing I do before leaving is calling this guy named/called Misha whether he’s fine with Murmansk, or if he wants the city to have a new name.
If I were truly thrown into this scenario, my first step would be accepting likely death. Even if you maintain status quo and do no good, you’ll be killed by the next guy in line. There’s nearly no way to both satisfy the current oligarchs and maintain enough power to prevent being replaced by one of them. There is also no way out, as Russia has carried out assassinations in foreign countries. Not that you’d make it onto a plane.
So I really would try to do all that. I’d tell them that whatever force got me there also gave me time to enact failsafes so that, if I disappeared, every property that every Russian billionaire owned would make unexpected contact with drones. Then I’d go ahead and post Putin’s files with every billionaire’s dirt and holdings hoping to start some fires they’d need to put out before coming for me. From there, an aggressive push towards democracy by appealing to the people in the hopes that they’ll back me, which might buy a little extra time.
I think this secures a few hours. They won’t want to move against a complete unknown that suddenly became president. That’s enough to call Biden (allegedly to negotiate US withdrawal from Ukraine in exchange for election interference in Harris’s favor) and send him every bit of data on the military that I could. That might be enough deterrence to buy more time: “the US military knows everything now, so killing me might have consequences.” I’d CC several other NATO members, but for time’s sake Biden is probably the one to call.
Maybe I could get some bodyguards that appear loyal to me, maybe not. But every bit of bluster I could muster, I’d throw it down out the gate, then start trying to fix the country before they call the bluff.
Yeah, I still die quickly, but even a single step towards improvement is worth my life. An easy decision to make when it was forfeit the second I became president. Even if I failed miserably, merely dumping presidential documents would have been worth it. Perhaps it’d get the ball rolling.
Edit: I missed the part where everyone loyal to Putin would be loyal to me. That opens up a ton of space to actually set up these failsafes or move against the oligarchs myself, as well as secure the Kremlin with men more or less actually loyal to me (by wiring them all a million USD on the spot with promise of more). Putin put down a rebellion from one of the most powerful oligarchs, so there might actually be a way to survive long enough to do many of the things on that list. I’d probably not dump the oligarch files and keep that on a disappearance failsafe then proceed mostly the same hoping to generate serious, potentially irreversible momentum before dying.
Sounds like a good way to get a pro Putin oligarch elected. Even with fair elections they have a lot of support.
There will be an epidemic of falls through windows. It will affect oligarchs and will spare the population. There is a cure: leaving the country after having relinquished all your money to the government.
Oligarchs problem solved.
Sounds like how Stalin got his start. “If I just kill this small group of bad people things will be better.”
Oh no, the people who replaced them are corrupt too. Ok, this next wave of executions will surely send the right message.
Nice try, Putin.
two chicks at the same time
“That’s it? If you were in charge of Russia, you’d do two chicks at the same time?”
It’s like running away from an octopus. You don’t have to be faster than the octopus, you just have to be faster than the guy standing next to you.
assign everyone a government mandated fursona
Freak the fuck out.
Pull back from Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia, and negotiate an immediate ceasefire.
Call as many political scientists and scholars as possible and get their advice on how the fuck I can design a reformed system of democratic governance that is robust enough to withstand the inevitable attempts to undermine and corrupt it.
Find the multitude of stashed billions from the various oligarchs and seize it, use the money to invest in overhauling Russian society–improving infrastructure and education, improving the standard of living, etc.
Yeah, people forget that tyrants never stand on their own. They are propped up by a complex system of corruption that benefits from the tyrant’s decisions. They will defend this system and the head authoritarian. Not out of love, devotion or loyalty, but to protect their own sources of ill gains. Just like a Mafia, it holds up on a shared complicity of its members on the crimes being committed. This is why generals force low level officers to witness the violations and tortures, and corrupt politicians tie in their underlings in the money laundering schemes. If everyone has something to lose, then everyone conspires to keep the corrupt system going.
Yeah, it’s a fantasy, and an extremely off-the-cuff, low-detail, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if list. In reality, I’d probably either shut up and change absolutely nothing while I figure out the power structures, or I’d just work out a payoff to quietly step down and leave without a fuss.
Call as many political scientists and scholars as possible
This is the most reddit answer
What, asking experts who have studied a topic and has forgotten more about systems of governance and effective anti corruption efforts than I’ll ever know is somehow bad now? The fuck?
It isn’t bad, it’s just the type of answer you’d see on reddit. I don’t know what i’d do, frankly.
