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EP417 · Society · first published 2026-10-26

Why Can't Putin Show Weakness? | Arto Luukkanen | Negotiator 417

Book review: Arto Luukkanen's history of Russia's violent transfers of power, Venäjän vallanvaihdosten julma historia (Docendo 2026, 485 pp.), runs from Kievan Rus' to the question of who follows Putin. The review is based on Neuvottelija 417, in which Sami Miettinen interviews the author. The book argues that power in Russia has rarely changed hands without violence, and that the security apparatus around the ruler has been the real seat of power from Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina to the FSB. Luukkanen also sketches two scenarios for Russia after Putin: a power struggle between the security services, or a new tsardom. Miettinen calls the book an excellent primer on Finland's neighbour. Historical figures given in the episode were checked and divergences are flagged.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society

Why Can’t Putin Show Weakness? | Arto Luukkanen | Negotiator 417

Summary: Arto Luukkanen’s Nappi takaraivoon tai ikkunasta ulos! Venäjän vallanvaihdosten julma historia (“A bullet to the back of the head or out of the window! The brutal history of Russia’s changes of power”, Docendo 2026, 485 pp., in Finnish) asks whether power in Russia has ever changed hands without a violent settling of scores. In Neuvottelija 417 Sami Miettinen goes through the book with its author, from Kievan Rus’ to Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Alexander II, Lenin, Stalin and Putin. One idea runs through all of it: a tsar always needs an executioner, a gang, and a group that does what it is told. Luukkanen calls Putin’s version of this a securocracy. Miettinen’s verdict is plain: “This is a very good book. I learned a lot from it.”

A note on reading this

The book in one sentence

Changes of power in Russia have rarely been peaceful, and the ruler’s real pillar of support has been his own machinery of violence. Luukkanen traces that chain from the 16th-century oprichnina through the Soviet secret police to Putin’s security services.

According to the publisher, the book covers peasants’ encounters with the knout, the murders of nobles and Soviet terror. It also asks what happens to power in Russia if Putin dies or is removed.

1. Defenestration: out of the window

The second half of the book’s title refers to defenestration. Luukkanen starts with the European precedent. In Prague in 1618, Bohemian nobles threw the emperor’s representatives out of a window of Hradčany Castle. The men landed in a dung heap and survived. In Luukkanen’s account the point was to show complete contempt: “He isn’t killed with a sword like a gentleman — he is thrown out of the window.”

In Russia, Luukkanen says, the tradition continues today. His example is the Lukoil chairman who fell from a window. Miettinen adds Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane exploded in August 2023. Luukkanen’s summary: “You do not rise against the master.”

Correction. Miettinen said the plane exploded at around 20 kilometres. Flight-tracking data put it at about 28,000 feet, roughly 8.5 km, before the sharp descent.

2. The Prigozhin mutiny: why Moscow trembled

Luukkanen describes Wagner’s June 2023 mutiny in detail. In Rostov-on-Don residents brought water and food to the tank crews. When Prigozhin turned towards Moscow, he says, the billionaires’ jets left for Dubai loaded with “gold bars and banknotes”.

In Luukkanen’s account the force was small, about 25,000 men with a 5,000-strong vanguard, but battle-hardened. His assessment is that had they crossed the Oka river, the National Guard would not have stopped them, and power would have changed hands amid looting.

The most interesting point is psychological. Prigozhin had spent nine years in a prison camp and, according to Luukkanen, belonged to the criminal elite (vor v zakone, “thief in law”). Putin, in Luukkanen’s words, was “a mere gopnik, a juvenile delinquent”. Both men knew, he says, which of them stood higher in the criminal hierarchy.

Miettinen went through the mutiny as it happened with Pekka Toveri in the episode Prigozhin vs Putin.

3. The book’s central thesis: the security apparatus is the real power

Miettinen sums up the book’s idea as a question: isn’t the security service the real force in the Russian state? Luukkanen answers that Putin is just one person who has “surrounded himself with a securocracy”. In 2000, Luukkanen says, Putin placed about 6,000 people with intelligence and siloviki backgrounds in key positions in the Russian state. First they took the posts, then the money. The original oligarchs were forced to give up their oil companies or leave.

From this follows what Luukkanen calls the dilemma of “the biggest boar on the block”: the leader cannot show weakness, because stepping aside means death.

The book starts this chain in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. In Miettinen’s summary, an “ancient FSB” was born then and has remained ever since.

4. The Mongols and Kievan Rus’

Miettinen challenges the author with Martti J. Kari’s thesis that Russia’s authoritarian strategic culture is a Mongol inheritance. Miettinen went through that thesis with Kari in Putin and Russia’s strategic culture. In Miettinen’s reading, Luukkanen starts from factors internal to Russia.

Luukkanen grants that Kari is partly right. The violence between princely cousins in Kievan Rus’ was, in his words, “poetic mafia”, like The Sopranos. Centralised power, taxation and harsh control, however, came with the Mongols. Behind them stood the political theology of Tengrism, which held that everything in the world, people included, belongs to the khan.

Luukkanen’s example is the fall of Kyiv in 1240. The city did not surrender at once, and he says all 60,000 inhabitants were killed. A few years later a monk travelling to the khan’s court found nothing at the site but bones and skulls.

Correction. Estimates of Kyiv’s population and of the number killed in 1240 vary widely, so 60,000 is one estimate among several. The monk is the papal envoy Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, who passed through Kyiv in 1246.

5. Ivan the Terrible: stern, well-read and sadistic

Russian groznyi becomes terrible in English. Luukkanen says a better rendering would be the Finnish jyrmy, roughly “stern” or “formidable”.

The Ivan that Luukkanen describes is contradictory:

Correction. Luukkanen said Ivan became tsar at 17. He was crowned in January 1547, aged 16.

Miettinen draws an observation about the whole book from this: many of the rulers have either a bad mentor, as Ivan had in Makarii, or an influential woman. The court also has its “Pushkins and poet boys”. Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire that she was a democrat at heart. In Miettinen’s words there is “an extraordinary two-facedness” in it.

6. Palace coups

The transfers of power in the book rarely end in a natural death:

Correction. Luukkanen placed the judicial reform in the 1870s. It was enacted in 1864 and implemented in the years that followed.

Miettinen draws the lesson that autocrats know in their bones that going soft is dangerous. In that light he considers Gorbachev and Yeltsin “a bit soft”. Luukkanen describes his own research in the KGB archive in Kyiv. According to it, the local secret police and the Communist Party of Ukraine asked for permission to use force, and Gorbachev refused. In his account, Ukrainian nationalists released in the 1987 amnesty spread democratic demands to the Donbas miners by 1989, and “that opens the floodgates”.

7. Finland’s chapter: same empire, different treatment

The Finnish part of the book interests Miettinen because it shows Russia’s gentler face. After 1809, in Luukkanen’s words, Finland was offered a “love campaign”:

To Luukkanen this was a step forward after 600 years in which Finns had “died, paid taxes and suffered for Sweden”.

The other side of the coin is the Great Wrath (isoviha), the Russian occupation during the Great Northern War. In Luukkanen’s account Ostrobothnia was to be destroyed completely so that it could not support a guerrilla movement, and at the Battle of Napue in 1714 “all the men and farmhands of Ostrobothnia” were wiped out.

According to Luukkanen, the Fennoman movement was favoured because Swedish speakers were seen as oriented towards Stockholm and therefore unreliable. The language rescript that Alexander II gave Snellman at Parola (1863) made Finnish an official language within 20 years. In Luukkanen’s words, that began Finnish’s journey “from a kitchen language to a language of learning”.

Here Miettinen gives his own view of J. V. Snellman. In his view Snellman secured the markka with “an absolutely incredible move”. His monetary policy during the famine years was, however, foolish in Miettinen’s view, because the markka was tied to a metal standard just when grain had to be bought. Miettinen has used the markka as an example in his book for Libera, Euron tulevaisuus – Suomen vaihtoehdot (“The future of the euro: Finland’s options”): a small currency of one’s own can sit alongside a large monetary system.

Correction. Miettinen spoke of the gold standard. Under Snellman the markka was tied to silver: the silver standard was approved in 1865 and took effect in 1866, just before the famine of 1866–1868. Finland moved to the gold standard only in 1878. The Great Wrath is usually dated 1713–1721.

8. Lenin and Stalin: the desk barbarian and handmade terror

Luukkanen calls Lenin a “desk barbarian”. While hiding in Finland in autumn 1917, Lenin wrote The State and Revolution, which held that a socialist state needs neither police nor army. In power, Luukkanen says, he demanded “more terror”.

Luukkanen recounts that the Cheka’s weekly bulletin of terror was closed after a few issues, once its figures began reaching foreign readers.

Under Yezhov, Luukkanen says, “about 800,000 people” were killed, and the killing was done “by hand”. Three-man troikas passed sentence, and prisoners were driven in black vans marked as bread vans to woods to be shot in the back of the head. The executioners treated their nerves with vodka. This is the bullet to the back of the head in the first half of the book’s title.

Correction. According to the NKVD’s own statistics, about 680,000 people were executed in 1937–1938, so Luukkanen’s figure is of the right order of magnitude.

Miettinen puts Lenin alongside Alexander II in a “club of honour for Finland’s friends” because he allowed Finland to become independent, “with a fox’s tail under his arm, of course”. Luukkanen’s view is that Lenin had no choice.

9. The return of empire and Finland’s choice

The book’s contemporary part describes how the empire was rebuilt. According to Luukkanen, Germany believed that trade would make Russia nicer. Russia instead saw Europe as “a horn of plenty” whose money could rebuild the empire. It happened in stages:

According to Luukkanen, the “butlers” of Finlandisation were ready, “but then the people decided otherwise”.

The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was, in Luukkanen’s account, Khrushchev’s gesture for the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav agreement. Inside the Soviet Union it had no practical meaning: it was “like taking the car keys out of my right pocket and putting them in the left”.

10. Two scenarios after Putin

For today’s reader, the most interesting part of the book is Luukkanen’s forecast. He offers two patterns.

1. A struggle between the security services. Under the constitution the prime minister would become acting president, and elections would follow. Luukkanen says the bureaucracy considers power “too important a thing to give to the people”. It would first try to agree on a successor by negotiation. That would not be easy, he says, because “none of them is an Olof Palme-style Swedish social democrat”. Relations between the security services are already poor. The army is the strongest but also the most tightly leashed. Luukkanen considers a situation resembling civil war possible.

2. A new tsardom. According to Luukkanen, Duginist ultranationalist circles want to be rid of the republic. He describes the possibility that the republic’s forms give way to an empire, “a holy state”. The securocracy would become the new nobility and start “calling each other counts and barons”. The historical parallel is Boris Godunov, who was acclaimed tsar before the Time of Troubles. What matters, Luukkanen says, is “whether the cloak of legitimacy stays on him”. It did not for Boris: famine came, and an impostor claiming to be Dmitrii.

Miettinen adds the effect of the war to the forecast. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and power plants are giving Russians their first cold winter, and mobilisation could reach the sons of Moscow and St Petersburg. Luukkanen says this is exactly what would be most dangerous for the system. An official family’s “crown prince” would sooner be sent abroad or found to have a heart defect than go to the front. That is why, in his view, mobilisation has been avoided to the last.

Verdict

What the book does well. Luukkanen tells Russian history through its transfers of power, and the structure holds. The recurring pattern is tsar, boyars, security apparatus and a silent people. That pattern fits 500 years into one book and makes Prigozhin’s mutiny read as a natural sequel to Ivan’s oprichnina. The author is also an archival researcher with his own material from the KGB archives, which shows in the sections on the Gorbachev era.

What a reader should know. The book is brutal, and deliberately so: in Miettinen’s words it “oozes violence”. The author treats the horrors with gallows humour, which suits the subject but not every reader. On the evidence of the episode, the spoken dates carry some imprecision. This review has not checked the book’s own figures.

Who it is for. Miettinen’s recommendation is unequivocal. He sees the book as a primer on Finland’s neighbour that “could be taught to small children at school”, and as material that “you won’t find in the school handouts”. He also recommends it as a Father’s Day or Christmas present. It suits especially a reader who wants to understand why the question of Putin’s successor is a dangerous matter in Russia rather than an administrative one.

Continued in the Inner Circle

After the episode, Miettinen and Luukkanen continued in the Inner Circle with a conversation about the title of docent: The Docent | Arto Luukkanen | Negotiator Inner Circle 167.

Sources

Neuvottelija (Negotiator) 417, published 26 October 2026 and recorded 7 October 2026. Runtime about 75 minutes. A book review of Arto Luukkanen’s Nappi takaraivoon tai ikkunasta ulos! Venäjän vallanvaihdosten julma historia (Docendo 2026, 485 pp., in Finnish). Luukkanen is a doctor of theology from the University of Helsinki and a docent in Russian history and political studies. The book argues that power in Russia has rarely changed hands without violence, and that the ruler’s security apparatus has been the real seat of power from Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina to the FSB. Luukkanen calls Putin’s system a securocracy: in 2000 about 6,000 people with intelligence and siloviki backgrounds were placed in key state posts. The episode covers Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny, the Mongol legacy, Ivan the Terrible, palace coups, Finland’s period of autonomy, Lenin and Stalin’s terror. Luukkanen sets out two scenarios after Putin: a power struggle between the security services, or a new tsardom. Dates given in the episode were checked: Ivan was crowned at 16 in 1547, Russia’s judicial reform was enacted in 1864, the markka was tied to silver in 1865–1866 and to gold only in 1878, and Prigozhin’s plane was flying at about 8.5 km. Sami Miettinen considers the book an excellent primer on Russia.

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