The point of sanctions is not necessarily to incite revolution; as duaoebg pointed out, regimes like their scapegoats, and anyways modern historical anecdotes s

The point of sanctions is not necessarily to incite revolution; as duaoebg pointed out, regimes like their scapegoats, and anyways modern historical anecdotes show that popular unrest is insufficient to incite revolution if the military remains loyal to the regime e.g. Tehran summer 2009. Rather, sanctions attempt to align financial incentives of those in power with the country issuing sanctions. It may seem (thankfully) foreign to those in the West, but in autocratic places like Russia, Iran, and China, the people who control the policy of the state are generally also the people who have large stakes in the major economic engines of the state. Given that autocrats tend to be motivated by wealth at least as much as they are motivated by power, sanctions can force autocrats to try to negotiate with sanctioning countries, wherein the autocrat tries to adopt his policy as little as possible to the sanctioning country (so as to keep a grip on power) in order to get wealth flowing again.