I See a Putin in Your Future 🔮

Polybius, Anacyclosis, and Why Activists Who Never Read History Keep Summoning Strongmen

Moscow, December 25, 1991, 7:32 PM. The Soviet flag comes down from the Kremlin. Seventy years of communist rule, over. The Cold War, won like a geopolitical Dark Souls fight except the loot is McDonald’s franchises.

Young people pour into streets despite December cold. Students pass around newly-legal books (Solzhenitsov, Orwell). A girl tells CNN she’s starting her own newspaper. Optimism is in the air. Babushkas cry because maybe grandchildren won’t fear state-sanctioned disappearances.

Francis Fukuyama publishes “The End of History.” Liberal democracy won forever, a thesis with the longevity of a celebrity marriage and twice the hubris. Thomas Friedman writes something about McDonald’s preventing wars.

The hope is genuine. Democracy is here. Russia is joining the West.

Cut to: Moscow, 2026.

Putin (dead-eyed KGB officer who never stopped being a KGB officer) has held power 26 years. Political opponents drink polonium tea and croak. Elections are performance art for an audience of observers who file reports everyone ignores. The girl who started a newspaper? Emigrated to Berlin after her newspaper got shut down for “foreign influence.”

How did we get here?

This is a pattern that repeats across civilizations, centuries. It’s is a pattern that transcends ethnicity or culture. It is observable like market crashes or a Brooklyn neighborhood’s life cycle from gritty to Goldman Sachs analyst housing. It’s a pattern observed by a Greek historian 2,200 years ago, and it tells you why all democracies are doomed to die, and how. Including the one you live in right now.