There are no elections in Russia. Elections are blatantly rigged and the parties are more or less seen as sock puppets for Putin. Everyone understands that he's the dictator and the military-intelligence apparatus is in charge.

This was the exact situation in Ataturk's Turkey, too. And it is the situation in the West as well, with the exception that in the West financial oligarchs are in charge and the political class is completely servile - just what I said earlier. In the US specifically, there are even more parallels with the CIA and military-industrial complex calling the shots.

They maintain the veneer of democracy because of the optics look. Even China and Iran pretend to be democracies.

Apparently, this optics strategy has not been very effective. I used to think that Putin was only pragmatically pretending to be a liberal, too, but the foundations that he has laid for the new Russian state make it incredibly obvious that he is not a secret autocratic populist ultranationalist. He is a liberal. His new constitution is liberal democratic. The political culture that he is forming of "denazification" wars and shapeless post-Soviet nationalism, the purges of nationalists - is this all just political theater, some form of bizarre deceptive manoeuvre? It's ridiculous. He is a typical liberal leader, who acts in typical liberal ways and adheres to typical liberal beliefs. The reason he seems different is simply because he is mostly competent.

It's kind of like the Roman Emperor before Diocletian's reforms. The Roman Emperors maintained the veneer of the republic and republican institutions like the senate and tribunes were kept running. But the Emperors ruled as dictators and everyone knew it and acknowledged it.

The Roman state was an aristocratic republic ruled by patrician elites. It's got nothing in common with modern liberalism and democracy, even if the latter may have appropriated some of the myths of the former.