Journal Article

Autocracy and Immortality: Vladimir Putin and the Problem of Time

Enroth, Henrik, Hjelm, Alexander

2025

Overview

This article offers a new perspective on autocracy. We analyze how the autocrat is compelled to confront time—and ultimately mortality—as a political problem. As a regime type, autocracy revisits one of the oldest questions in political life: the question of what makes the polity persist and stay identical with itself over time, in spite of inevitable changes in its makeup with the passing of time. Since autocracy entails a blurring of the distinction between the natural person of the ruler and the legal-political person of the state, the autocrat faces the challenge of embodying both continuity and change in political life directly, physically, in a way reminiscent of the European Middle Ages and early modernity. Considering the case of Vladimir Putin, we discuss the implications that follow for our understanding of autocracy. Most notably, this aspect of autocracy makes the mere prospect of the death of the ruler seem not only personally but also politically unacceptable. Autocracy, we argue, should therefore be understood as an essentially unfinished regime type, indefinitely suspended between the ruler’s claim to personally embody the body politic and the eventual, inevitable, demonstration of the unsustainability of that claim. We conclude by discussing what it would take to actually bring autocracy to completion, which is nothing less than the immortality of the ruler.

• Subject: Autocracy / Baltic and East European studies / Cosmism / Democracy / Immortality / Politics, Economy and the Organization of Society / Politik, ekonomi och samhällets organisering / Transhumanism / Vladimir Putin / Östersjö- och Östeuropaforskning