Reflections of Russia on Turkey’s Road to Unfreedom
Russia pioneered the politics of eternity, where succession was erased and imagination suffocated. Turkey has followed the same path, step by step, into its own road to unfreedom.
The limits of politics are bound to the imagination of a nation’s citizens. When a system is designed to barren imagination, the public stops expecting change, let alone reform.
Our political imagination is withered.
This is the fate of diverse societies under long-ruling authoritarian leaders. Viktor Orbán. Tayyip Erdoğan. And the master of the craft, Vladimir Putin.
Suffocating imagination takes years, blood, and an unending stream of crises, large and small.
As I have written earlier, Turkey’s anxieties rest on two foundations. One is dismemberment by foreign encroachment, rooted in the trauma of the Ottoman collapse and the Treaty of Sèvres. The other is the fear that its secular and modern trajectory might be overturned by “backward” forces, namely Islamists. The first was imprinted by imperial loss. The second by Kemalism, which transformed an empire into a modern republic and cast the military as the guardian of this revolution, defining threats, allies, and enemies.
Yet the last quarter century proved that another current, drawn from Russia, posed the greater threat to Turkey’s fragile democracy.
Erdoğan and the AKP entered office in 2002 as outsiders, riding a wave of moral, political, and economic crises from the 1990s. Two years earlier in Russia, Putin had secured the presidency with an absolute majority, aided by lopsided media coverage, tampered vote counts, and the atmosphere of the Second Chechen War.
The AKP’s first decade was precarious. It survived by aligning itself with the European Union, the Gülen movement, and liberal intellectuals. By the early 2010s, it had begun the work of state capture—through sham trials like Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer) that reshaped the military and security apparatus, and through the transfer of media ownership to loyalists. That process has since been cemented. Even so, political imagination remained alive among the public as the decade closed.
The asphyxiation began when the principle of succession was undermined. One of the most prominent thinkers of our time, Oxford-educated historian of Russia, Timothy Snyder calls this the “politics of eternity,” where power never changes hands even if elections are held. Other terms exist in political science, yet for the purpose of this post I prefer Snyder’s framing, since it captures well the symmetry between Russia and Turkey’s path to unfreedom.
When Putin secured his March 2000 victory, “managed democracy” was born. Snyder explains that Vladislav Surkov, a half-Chechen PR strategist and Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, orchestrated the stagecraft. He turned a little-known candidate into a national figure by manufacturing crises, allowing Putin to consolidate real power. Surkov would later refine this technique as he rose through Putin’s ranks.1
In the politics of eternity, succession had to be neutralized.
Succession is the cornerstone of political imagination.
“Functional states produce a sense of continuity for their citizens. If states sustain themselves, citizens can imagine change without fearing catastrophe. The mechanism that ensures that a state outlasts a leader is called the principle of succession. A common one is democracy. The meaning of each election is the promise of the next one. Since each citizen is fallible, democracy transforms cumulative mistakes into a collective belief in the future.”2
Surkov, together with fascist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin—well known in Turkey and embraced by Eurasianists within the security establishment—framed the “pillars of Russian statehood” as centralization, personification, and idealization: the state must be unified, authority embodied in one individual, and that figure glorified. By glorifying the ruler, the process of succession could be erased. Democracy disappeared with it.3
These pillars were replicated in Turkey after 2010. Erdoğan branded protests and opposition as treacherous, foreign-backed, and illegitimate, escalating repression year by year.
My aim is neither to equate Russia and Turkey in a grand theory of democratic breakdown nor to invoke a conspiratorial polycrisis argument, but to show how authoritarian techniques have diffused and been adapted.
“The road to unfreedom is the passage from politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity,”4 writes Snyder. Turkey reached halfway in June 2015, when Erdoğan’s AKP lost its majority, largely because of the rise of the Kurdish HDP during the peace process. Erdoğan did not concede. With Devlet Bahçeli’s backing, coalition talks were sabotaged, parliament declared unworkable, and elections rerun. By November, the AKP had regained control. The peace process had collapsed.
Two years later, the 2017 referendum converted Turkey into a hyper-presidential system. Allegations of irregularities were brushed aside. Erdoğan dismissed them with a Turkish proverb: atı alan Üsküdar’ı geçti—“the one who seized the horse has already crossed Üsküdar.” The official result was barely 51 percent, yet no investigation was permitted.
In March 2019, Istanbul’s mayoral election delivered a shock defeat. CHP candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu won. Erdoğan did not concede. He forced a rerun. İmamoğlu won again, this time with a greater margin. For a moment, political imagination flickered back to life. In the 2023 local elections, İmamoğlu triumphed again, and hope grew stronger.
No one foresaw that the tunnel itself would be destroyed. In March 2025, İmamoğlu’s university diploma was annulled. He was jailed, along with hundreds of municipal staff, on fabricated corruption charges. Since then, there have been ten raids and sixteen CHP mayors arrested. The goal is to brand İmamoğlu as the head of organized crime and replace elected mayors with state appointees—party loyalists masquerading as administrators.
As in Putin’s Russia, Erdoğan’s oligarchic party-state has rendered change not only impossible but unthinkable.5
That is the greatest danger: the suffocation of belief in alternation of power.
It is not easy, I know, yet the only way back from the road to unfreedom is to restore our political imagination. Every empire and republic that abandoned succession imagined its eternity secure. None endured. The future will not be shaped by the permanence of authoritarian leader’s order if political imagination is revived.
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Vintage, 2018), 47.
Ibid, 38.
Ibid, 47.
Ibid, 259.
Ibid, 80.