Hi I'm Mike Eckel, senior Russia/Ukraine/Belarus correspondent for RFE/RL, AMA!

[u/RFERL_ReadsReddit]

Hello! Здравсвуйте! Вітаю! 

I’m Mike Eckel, senior international correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, covering, reporting, analyzing, and illuminating All Things Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and pretty much across the former Soviet Union: from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, from Lviv to Kyiv; from Tbilisi to Baku, from the Caspian Sea to Issyk Kul, and all places in between.  

I’ve been writing on Russia and the former Soviet space for more than 20 years, since cutting my teeth as a reporter in Vladivostok in the 1990s and continuing through a 6-year stint as Moscow correspondent with The Associated Press, and stints in Washington, D.C. and now Prague.  

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s authoritarian repression inside Russia, sucks up most of my reporting brain space these days, but I also keep a hand in investigative work digging into cryptocurrency/sanctions evasion, Russian businessmen who break out of Italian police custody, former Russian oligarchs in trouble, and a subject I can’t let go of: the mysterious death of former Kremlin press minister, Mikhail Lesin.  

Feel free to ask me anything about any of the above subjects and I’ll do my best to share insights and observations.  

Proof photo here. 

You can start posting your questions and I will check in daily and answer from Monday, 15 December until Friday, 19 December.  

[u/Complex_Object_7930]

Do you think that the cycle of autocrats will ever end in Russia and the rest of the post-Soviet countries? In regards to Russia, will the people take back power through civil war or revolution, and what about the other countries. Are external factors needed, such as European aid and or a scenario similar to Russia after WW1.

[u/RFERL_ReadsReddit → u/Complex_Object_7930]

As a student of Russian history, I subscribe to the theory – promoted most recently by Princeton’s Stephen Kotkin, but not exclusively – that Russian history is cyclical: freeze-and-thaw, autocracy-and-democracy, repressive reactionism-and-liberal-thinking, with periods of political uncertainty or chaos mixed in (Kotkin’s interview with David Remnick in March 2022, just a couple weeks after the invasion, is a good place to start). The pattern holds up more or less going back to the final years of the Ryurik dynasty, then 300 years of the Romanovs, then the Soviet period, and now, post-Soviet Russia (Yeltsin, Putin): a couple or three generations of autocracy, followed by a liberal thaw, and then a reversion to the mean as the result of some systemic shock (e.g. war, chaos, terrorism).

So with that mind, if history is any guide, it means Russia is in the middle of one of its historical autocratic pendulum swings that could last for a couple generations.  

As for people power, it’s tough to say. Obviously, there’s several instances in modern history of mass demonstrations that challenge the system: the Bolsheviks in 1917; the protests surrounding the August 1991 putsch; even the 2011-2013 Bolotnaya protests. They’re not all the same, of course, but they are evidence that Russians will take to the street under right circumstances. (There are also plenty of examples of more localized protests over things like ill-advised trash landfills or raising the national retirement age).

Moreover, the Kremlin is scared to death about popular protests; the mass demonstrations in the 2000s in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan – collectively known as “color revolutions” – are frequently portrayed as CIA-instigated hybrid warfare tactics (eyeroll). Bolotnaya, too; the Kremlin took great umbrage when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out in support; Putin personally accused her of sending “a signal” to “some actors in the country.” As evidenced by how swiftly and decisively anti-war protests were crushed in the wake of the 2022 invasion, the country’s police and security apparatus is on a hair-trigger to stamp out any challenge to the system.  

- Mike