As the Brezhnev years reached their twilight, and it was obvious that Communism would never arrive, the Party decided to rename their moribund system as Real Socialism. The idea was to convey a sense of Marxist progress, but it was taken as confirming the popular view that Soviet assets belonged to everybody and also to nobody. The Soviet Union was nevertheless governed by a structured hierarchical system with recognizable rules and an understood set of relationships with the outside world. Real Putinism, which Russia has now achieved, is more akin to the world as it was in the beginning: without form, and void.

Successful states have been described in a number of analogous ways. Francis Fukuyama’s (Political Order and Political Decay) is apt for Russia. It takes democracy as a desirable system but one dependent on other conditions: a strong, modern and capable state; a rule of law that provides property rights, citizen security, and transparency of transactions; and the accountability of its rulers. Russia fails in all three categories.

The assertion that Russia is not a strong state may seem perverse, at least on first reading. Putin is after all a dominant figure (aka a Strong Man) who manages to lead the West by the nose and boasts astronomical poll figures. Yet the history of his rule is one of the steady draining of the institutions that are meant to govern Russia, and of their capacity for self-renewal in case of need. There are more bureaucrats than ever there were, and a thicket of rules, but the bureaucrats answer to varying masters and are not guided by an independent ethos stemming from a sense of duty to the state. On the contrary, many of them are deeply corrupt. That condition has spread and deepened over the years, and applies as much to the regions as it does to the federal center.

Putin’s recent and unexplained absence from public notice for 11 days was a telling illustration of the deeply personalized nature of the Russian state in its present condition. It was a reminder, too, of the parallel problem of the succession: no one knew who was in charge, or whether there was even a question as to what if anything was afoot. Prime Minister Medvedev clearly was not at the helm. Rumours that the FSB was out to get Kadyrov, so as to bring Chechen freebooting under control, grew on the accusation that Chechens had killed Boris Nemtsov. The point here is not whether such suppositions were true or fantastical, but that their currency would not prosper in a well organized state, or even, in my view at least, one that might be under adequate management.

There is perhaps no need to argue, to take Fukuyama’s second condition, that Russia is subject to the rule of universally applicable law or that the transactions of its leaders, at any level, are transparent. Neither is, plainly enough, the case. The question of how the Russian state provides for the security of its citizens is however worth further consideration. There ought to be no doubt as to the state holding a monopoly over the use of force. A centralized authoritarian state would normally be expected to be particularly jealous in that regard. Today’s Russia fails that criterion: witness Kadyrov, both in and out of Chechnya; the continuing rise of vigilante groups affiliated to the Kremlin but not directly managed by it, such as the newly emerging anti-Maidan; skinheads or other hooligans used to police pro-Putin demonstrations; Cossack groups enforcing “Russian Values”; thugs who beat up over-curious journalists; restless activists spreading in Russia the gospel of violence practiced in Donbas; criminal groups working with the Kremlin; and of course Nemtsov’s murder. None of these examples, with the exception of the last, are without precedent, and that only because of the status of the victim. But such practices have grown, and the Kremlin’s association with their practitioners has grown along with it. How far the Kremlin can stay in control of them is a different matter.

Which brings me to Fukuyama’s third condition: the accountability of Russia’s rulers. That condition holds, in a general sense. Otherwise, why does Putin repeatedly warn of the dangers of a “Color Revolution”? But it is not enough for a state with a structured and prosperous future to be accountable only in the sense that its arbiter is the risk of civil war. It is arguable that there are forces within the small group around Putin himself that seek to guide his decisions, but there is no evidence that they can in any real sense hold their President to account. On the contrary, their leverage would appear to be slight at best, and their overall quality low. They are answerable to Putin rather than the diminished institutions of the state envisaged by the Constitution. That is true even of the security organs, which are also in a degree of competition with each other, but it is also for question how far Putin can now exercise full authority over them: their independence may be qualified, but it exists.

The Russian authorities have over the past 15 years consistently narrowed the space for criticism of their ideas and policies. It is hard to exaggerate the dangers of that process, or its particular intensity since Putin’s re-election in 2012. If truth has no space, lies compel—for a time. Propaganda is meant in principle to serve an organized purpose at the behest of its directors. But over time its perpetrators are trapped by its distortions. The information they are given is ever more slanted by the tale that their providers suppose will fit what those at the top want to hear. Who knows what Russia’s top leaders really now believe? Truth has always been a conditional weapon for them, but in the absence of public debate, they are in the end free to imagine what they like.

Real Putinism means that no one in Russia is accountable for anything, even sending Russian soldiers to die in Ukraine. After all, they aren’t there, are they?