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| From Eastern Europe to the oil fields of Central Asia, President Vladimir V. Putin is straining to maintain a sphere of influence that will keep the forces of history at bay. | 从东欧到中亚油田，俄罗斯总统普京正在竭力维持自己的势力范围，以抵抗历史的力量。 |
| The Russian leader’s allies, perched atop former Soviet republics, are growing old in office or face rising discontent. The bulwarks they have provided against the expanding frontiers of democracy and Western military power look increasingly shaky. | 一些前苏联加盟共和国的领导人是这位俄罗斯总统的盟友，他们当中有的已执政多年、正在老去，有的面临着国内日益高涨的不满情绪。他们为抵御民主和西方军事力量的扩张建筑的堡垒看起来越来越不稳固。 |
| So Mr. Putin is relying more on brute force to hold it all together: preparing a possible invasion of Ukraine to keep it out of NATO, sending troops to Kazakhstan to suppress protests and threatening to do the same in Belarus. | 因此，普京正在更多地依靠暴力维持原状：他准备入侵乌克兰以阻止其加入北约；派军队去哈萨克斯坦镇压抗议活动，并威胁对白俄罗斯采取同样的行动。 |
| Coercing allies is hardly unusual for great or regional powers. The Soviet Union, whose loss Mr. Putin often laments, sent tanks into Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Still, it bonded its empire through Communism, which instilled a common mission and a sense of existential conflict with the capitalist West. | 大国或区域强国胁迫盟友的做法并非不同寻常。苏联（普京经常对它的解体感到惋惜）就曾出动坦克进入匈牙利、捷克斯洛伐克和阿富汗。尽管如此，苏联维系其帝国靠的是共产主义，这个意识形态在其势力范围内树立了一种共同的使命感，以及与西方资本主义世界你死我亡的冲突感。 |
| Now, with capitalism and at least pretensions of democracy the norm on both sides of the old Iron Curtain, there is little to justify fealty to Moscow beyond the shared desire of post-Soviet strongmen to help one another cling to office. | 如今，在曾经的铁幕两侧，资本主义以及至少是自我标榜的民主都已成常态，除了后苏联时代的铁腕人物为保住权力互相帮助的共同愿望外，效忠莫斯科的理由已经不多了。 |
| “There’s no real ideological glue to hold together this motley alliance of people with very different interests,” said Timothy M. Frye, a Columbia University political scientist. | “缺乏真正的意识形态粘合剂，将这个有着不同利益者的五花八门联盟团结起来，”哥伦比亚大学政治学者蒂莫西·弗莱说。 |
| Mr. Putin’s sphere of influence, for all the trouble it causes the West, is increasingly a cage of his own making. The more that he relies on force to prop up aging, unpopular autocrats on his periphery, the more besieged his alliance becomes, both by dissent at home and Western pressure abroad. | 尽管给西方带来了不少麻烦，但普京的势力范围已越来越多地成为他给自己制造的牢笼。他越是依靠武力支撑俄罗斯周围那些不受欢迎的老朽独裁者，他的联盟就会越来越多地陷入国内的异议和国外西方压力的重围。 |
| As a result, the very threats that Mr. Putin hoped to avert are instead growing. Ukraine is rushing into the West’s arms. Provocations by Belarus, rooted in its crackdown on rising dissent, are uniting Europe against its pro-Moscow leader. And protesters in long-stable Kazakhstan are demanding change. | 结果是，普京想避免的那些威胁反而越来越大。乌克兰正急着投入西方的怀抱。白俄罗斯挑衅西方的根源在于对国内日益增长的异议的镇压，这种挑衅已让欧洲团结起来抵制该国亲莫斯科的领导人。在曾经长期稳定的哈萨克斯坦，抗议者们正在诉求改革。 |
| Mr. Putin has sought to turn his reactive escalations into a strength at home, portraying his interventions into those countries’ problems as reclaiming Soviet greatness. | 在国内，普京寻求将自己愈发升级的回应转变为对自己有力的东西，他把俄罗斯对这些国家的干预描述为是为了恢复苏联时代的伟大。 |
| But a tepid public reaction, as well as the Kremlin’s recent crackdowns on civil society and political rivals, Dr. Frye said, indicated that “the usual narratives that Putin has used to shore up his rule are just not working as well.” | 但公众的反应并不热烈，加上克里姆林宫最近对公民社会和政治对手的镇压，表明“普京用来巩固其统治的惯常叙事并未奏效”，弗莱说。 |
| Imposing Loyalty | 强迫忠诚 |
| Mr. Putin’s fear of democratic encroachment is often traced to the so-called color revolution democratic uprisings that swept several former Soviet republics in the 2000s. He and his deputies still speak often of those events, usually as Western plots to subvert Russian power. | 普京对民主不断扩大的恐惧往往被追溯到本世纪头十年里席卷几个前苏联加盟共和国的民主起义，即所谓的颜色革命。他和他的副手们仍经常谈论这些事件，通常将其称为西方颠覆俄罗斯政权的阴谋。 |
| But Mr. Putin’s response did not crystallize until 2012, when he cracked down violently on protests against him in Russia. Many of the demonstrators belonged to the Russian middle class that had once widely backed him. This elevated hard-liners within his administration, while also leading Mr. Putin to shift his power base to security services. | 但普京对颜色革命的回应直到2012年才成形，他在那年用暴力镇压了反对他的俄罗斯抗议活动。许多示威者曾属于来自普遍支持普京的俄罗斯中产阶级。镇压让政府内部的强硬派占了上风，同时也导致普京将自己的权力基础转移到了安全部门。 |
| The Kremlin, increasingly hawkish and nationalistic, even paranoid, settled on a strategy of propping up neighboring leaders who would control dissent and oppose the West. | 越来越强硬、民族主义甚至偏执的克里姆林宫选择了支持周边国家那些能遏制异见、抵抗西方的领导人的政策。 |
| As a result, Mr. Putin came to believe that only leaders who look like him — autocratic strongmen — could be trusted to keep the dangers of democracy and Western influence at bay. | 结果是，普京开始有了一种信念，那就是只有与自己一样的铁腕专制领导人才能被信任来将民主的危险和西方的影响拒之门外。 |
| Any others would have to be forced into loyalty. | 任何其他人都不得不被迫效忠。 |
| After Ukrainian protesters ejected their country’s pro-Moscow president in 2014, Mr. Putin did not seek to persuade newly empowered Ukrainian voters to align with Moscow. Rather, hoping to strong-arm Ukrainian leaders into obedience, Russia invaded and annexed one part of Ukraine and sponsored separatists in another. | 乌克兰的抗议者2014年驱逐了该国亲莫斯科的总统后，普京并没有试图说服重新掌握了自主权的乌克兰选民与莫斯科结盟。他反而希望用武力迫使乌克兰领导人服从莫斯科，俄罗斯的做法是：吞并乌克兰的一个地区，并在另一个地区支持分裂分子。 |
| So far, this strategy has largely backfired. Western powers increased their support for Ukraine, and Ukrainian voters, once divided over relations with Russia, turned sharply against it. But Mr. Putin, perhaps unable to see a neighboring democracy as anything other than a threat, has only escalated his efforts, and is now threatening a major invasion of Ukraine. | 到目前为止，这个策略在很大程度上适得其反。西方大国加大了对乌克兰的支持力度，曾经在对俄关系上存在分歧的乌克兰选民也转向了强烈反对俄罗斯。但普京已升级了自己的努力，并正在威胁要大举入侵乌克兰，这可能是因为他只会把相邻的民主国家视为一种威胁。 |
| This may well forestall overt alignment between Ukraine and the West, or even force Washington to redouble its acknowledgment of Russian interests there. But one danger for Mr. Putin is that it may not work forever and, once failed, could see yet another former Soviet republic join the European institutions that he insists are a threat to him. | 普京的做法很可能会阻止乌克兰与西方公开结盟，甚至会迫使华盛顿强调美国承认俄罗斯在乌克兰的利益。但对普京来说，一种危险是，这个做法也许不会永远奏效，一旦失败，可能会让他看到又一个前苏联加盟共和国成为欧洲机构的成员，他一直坚称这些欧洲机构对俄罗斯构成威胁。 |
| A Shrinking Circle | 越来越小的圈子 |
| Mr. Putin’s reliance on fellow strongmen has proved nearly as risky. | 事实证明，普京对其他铁腕人物的依赖有几乎同样的风险。 |
| Strongman-ruled countries, which concentrate power in one person’s hands at the expense of governing institutions, tend to be more unstable, more corrupt and less economically effective, all of which deepen public dissatisfaction. | 在铁腕人物统治的国家，权力集中在一个人手里，而不加强治理制度的建设，这种国家往往更不稳定、更腐败，经济效率也更低，所有这些问题都会加深公众的不满。 |
| The dangers of this can be seen in Kazakhstan, where a carefully planned transition from one leader to the next broke down into violent unrest. | 在哈萨克斯坦可以看到这种危险。该国精心安排的从现任领导人到下任领导人的权力过渡出了问题，引发了暴力动乱。 |
| Mr. Putin sent a Russian-led force of 2,500 troops to Kazakhstan to help put down the turmoil, at a time when tensions with Ukraine and Belarus were already simmering. It has been an illustration of the perilous bargain holding Mr. Putin and his allies together, in which they are essentially obligated to guarantee one another’s rule by force. | 普京向哈萨克斯坦派遣了一支由俄罗斯领导的2500人的部队，帮助平息动荡，此时正值乌克兰和白俄罗斯的紧张局势升温之际。这正说明普京和他的盟友通过危险的交易团结在一起，在这种交易中，他们在本质上有义务用武力保证彼此的统治。 |
| Strongman leaders are also likelier to start conflicts and likelier to lose them, Erica Frantz, a Michigan State University scholar of authoritarianism, said she has found in her research. | 密歇根州立大学研究威权主义的学者埃里卡·弗兰茨说，她在研究中发现，强人领导人也更有可能引发冲突，而且更有可能在冲突中失败。 |
| “Personalists don’t have to bargain over policy, and lack of accountability leads to riskier behavior,” she said, using a formal term for such leaders. | 她用一个专业术语来形容这些领导人，她说：“个人主义者(personalist)不必在政策上讨价还价，且缺乏问责制会导致冒更大风险的行为。” |
| While their fear of democracy makes them useful allies to Mr. Putin, the downsides of their rule increasingly bedevil his informal alliance. | 虽然对民主的恐惧使他们成为普京的有用盟友，但他们统治中的缺陷正在给普京的非正式联盟造成越来越多的困扰。 |
| “Provocations are what we would expect. We’d also expect some of his moves to be bad choices,” Dr. Frantz said. | “挑衅是我们预料之中的。我们还预计他的一些举动将是错误的选择，”弗朗茨博士说。 |
| Even with democracy’s global travails, it has nonetheless remained widely accepted since the Cold War’s end, beyond a handful of countries like China or Cuba, as the default, forcing even unabashed dictators to at least pretend at democracy. | 尽管民主在全球范围内遭遇挫折，但自冷战结束以来，它仍然获得广泛接受，除了中国或古巴等少数国家之外，它仍然被视为默认制度，甚至迫使不折不扣的独裁者至少也要假装民主。 |
| The result is a circle of pro-Moscow strongmen who frequently struggle to persuade their citizens why it is necessary to accept fewer freedoms than those in neighboring countries. | 结果就是，一群亲莫斯科的强人常常吃力地想说服他们的公民，为什么拥有比邻国公民更少的自由是必要的。 |
| Belarus exemplifies the dangers. Last year, as dissent rose over the government’s failures to address the pandemic, the president’s escalating crackdowns became a source of diplomatic conflict with the rest of Europe, which ensnared Mr. Putin. | 白俄罗斯就是危险的例证。去年，随着对政府未能解决疫情的异议增加，总统不断升级的镇压行动成为与欧洲其他国家发生外交冲突的根源，这使普京陷入困境。 |
| Some Belarusian opposition activists, aware of Russia’s influence, signaled their openness to working with Moscow. But, in what may be a reflection of the Kremlin’s narrow insistence on familiar autocrats, for all their missteps, it has ignored their outreach. | 一些意识到俄罗斯影响力的白俄罗斯反对派活动人士表示，他们对于跟莫斯科合作持开放态度。但是克里姆林宫无视他们抛出的橄榄枝，这恐怕反映了它仍选择狭隘地支持熟悉的独裁者，尽管这些独裁者犯了许多错误。 |
| Much as with Ukraine, Mr. Putin is left with a strategy in Belarus or Kazakhstan of ever-escalating coercion, albeit conducted through his allies in office. | 与乌克兰一样，普京在白俄罗斯或哈萨克斯坦只能采取不断升级的胁迫策略，尽管是通过他在任的盟友实施的。 |
| These cycles, of shoring up a sphere of influence built on distrust and intimidation, can take on a logic of their own. So the strategy is pursued even when it appears likely to produce the opposite of Mr. Putin’s hoped-for results: both inviting the very threats he fears and eroding the alliance on which he has rested so much of his future. | 这样的循环撑起了一个建立在不信任和恐吓基础上的势力范围，它有自己的运转逻辑。因此，即使它似乎可能产生与普京地愿望相反的结果——既招致了他所担心的威胁，又削弱了他赖以维系未来的联盟关系，但该战略仍在继续。 |
| “It will certainly produce more militarization of the alliance’s eastern flank,” Emma Ashford, a researcher at the Atlantic Council research group wrote of NATO’s likely response to Russia’s threats against Ukraine. “Just because we think it’s a stupid, self-defeating move on the part of Russia doesn’t mean they won’t do it.” | “这肯定会导致联盟东翼更加军事化，”大西洋理事会研究小组的研究员艾玛·阿什福德在谈到北约可能针对俄罗斯对乌克兰的威胁做出反应时写道。“仅仅因为我们认为俄罗斯这样做愚蠢且适得其反，并不意味着他们就不会这样做了。” |
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