The disarray and likely collapse of Vladimir Putin's effort to mobilize 300,000 conscripts to fight in Ukraine suggests that his iron grip on power could someday soon be broken as quickly and surprisingly as the czar's grip was broken in 1917 and the grip of Soviet totalitarianism was broken in 1990. But with what consequences?
A hundred years of Russian experiences with overthrowing autocracy suggest only another turn in a depressing cycle. Americans tried but failed to arrest that cycle when U.S. troops actually invaded to support anti-Bolshevik White Russians in the 1920s and when free-market evangelists in the 1990s put their dirty fingers into the Russian economy, only to wind up getting burned.
