President Putin is having a difficult time at the moment. Now that former president Trump has left office Putin has moved into the number one spot of most pressing threat to liberal democracies albeit probably not the long term greatest.

His arrest of the man he tried to have assassinated, Alexi Navalny, on his return to Russia has not gone well. First, tens of thousands of Russians in cities across the enormous country turned out in freezing weather to protest leading to some 5k arrests.

You can understand why President Putin does not see eye to eye with Mr Navalny given the latter’s remorseless focus on the former’s corruption. The YouTube video recounting some of the President’s early career and the development of Putin Palace has been downloaded by 6m+ people but has also been accessed via a range of other sites.

The video is the best part of two hours long and narrated at breakneck speed by Mr Navalny. Some will no doubt suggest this is simply an opposition politician trying to besmirch his opponent. However, much of the information about the President’s early career with the Stassi in Dresden, the Mayors office in St Petersburg and the Yeltsin government in Moscow ties closely with that provided by others notably Cathrine Belton’s excellent book “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West.”

Of course the Russian leaders duplicity is not something lacking evidence. His explicit rejection of any suggestion that his countries troops were in the Crimean peninsula until he annexed it in 2014. His denial of any involvement in the deaths of a number of people all of whom were opponents and critics, specifically threatened by the president before they were killed. Then of course there were the attempted assassinations of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Mr Navalny with the use of weapon grade Novichok nerve agent. None of which he knew anything about.

If all those protests a were not enough, he then has a phone conversation with the new President of the United States. This time the content of the call was made public by the White House and not the Kremlin in a break with recent tradition. Also the tone seems to have been somewhat different. It was not a cosy chat about the many things Russia and the US have in common!

President Biden raised a number of awkward matters. Notably the ongoing cyber attack on the US, Russias’s actions in the Ukraine, its attempts to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections and specifically the attempt to assassinate Mr Navalny, and his arrest on his return to Moscow. Further, president Biden did not come off the call to announce that he had been reassured by president Putin that all these things were not true, or grossly exaggerated by hostile press coverage and president Biden’s own misinformed National Intelligence agencies.

All of this must have made Putin long for happier times, before the November US election. Many would think that after twenty years being top tyrant and an increasingly hostile environment the attractions of retirement would start to grow in President Putin’s mind. Unfortunately, this is not so simple, even if he was tempted.

One of the biggest problems of being a tyrant is how you step down with out getting killed. As top tyrant you can only stay there by destroying or cowing all alternative centres of power, like a free press and independent judiciary. That is all ok when you can rely on people with guns doing as you tell them. The minute you cannot you are at the mercy of whoever is next top tyrant.

This creates something of a vicious circle. You are loath to stand down for the reason suggested above so you have to remain in power. But in order to remain top tyrant, you have to keep all aspiring top tyrants in fear of you. Over time this begins to rub more and more of them up the wrong way. You notice this and redouble your efforts to instil fear, and so on until…

There is no doubt President Putin is a shrewd operator and had built a veritable army of supporters who depend absolutely on his patronage. However, when the economy is performing terribly, and at the same time as wages and pensions are stagnant the states coffers are being pillaged to build Imperial Palaces tempers fray.

As a court decides the fate of Mr Navalny it is very likely that telephone justice will prevail and a call from the Kremlin will determine the views of the justices. But the Kremlin may be thinking very hard about what the call should say. Opposition is growing and it is difficult to know whether Mr Navalny is more of a threat outside and campaigning or inside and a continuing focus on Russian injustice. Sadly, I suspect president Putin will revert to his standard playbook and imprison his opponent.

However he should keep in mind that there is no rule says countries can only have one revolution.