russia political system essay

Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began

• Maria Snegovaya

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Scholars often blame Russia’s recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders: Yeltsin or Putin. This essay casts doubt on such accounts. It argues instead that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced not a democratic transition but a temporary weakening of the state (incumbent capacity). This is evidenced by a lack of elite rotation and the preservation of the same type of formal and informal institutions that characterized Russia’s political system in the past. Accordingly, subsequent re-autocratization of Russian politics was just a matter of time.

I f the Russia of three decades ago, shortly after the Soviet breakup, was a democracy (albeit a weak and fledgling one), who or what sank it? Was it President Boris Yeltsin, with his October 1993 decision to crush opponents by force, his pushing of an executive-dominated constitution, and his disastrous choice of Vladimir Putin as his successor? Had Yeltsin selected someone else, might things be different today?

The answer, I am afraid, is not to be found in something as contingent as bad leadership. The question “Who lost Russia?” is meaningless because Russia, from the point of view of democracy, was never truly “gained.” The Soviet Union broke up in 1991, but no real democratic transition took place. Instead, the former communist system remained in place, with only a few outward appearances shifting: the old Soviet wolf in new clothing. The Soviet-era ruling groups and institutions largely survived at the top of Russian politics. One exception was—or should have been—the market economy, but even there, old elites seized for themselves the most lucrative assets and positions. The eventual re-autocratization of Russia was just a matter of time.

About the Author

Maria Snegovaya   is a postdoctoral fellow at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Her essay (with Sheri Berman) “Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy” appeared in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Democracy. She is author of the April 2022 Journal of Democracy  online exclusive “ Will Putin Outlast War? ”

View all work by Maria Snegovaya

The temporary weakening of an authoritarian regime may sometimes be conflated with a democratic transition. A transition, however, requires fundamental, systemic changes in a given polity. Most authoritarian breakdowns, however, do not bring about democratization but lead instead to a new authoritarian regime or state collapse and anarchy. 1

A democratic transition means the institutionalization of new rules such as tolerance of opposition, bargaining and compromise among different political forces, pluralist structures and procedures of competition, and the peaceful, lawful transfer of power according to electoral outcomes. 2 In transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, political elites are crucial: They set the structural conditions that promote the institutionalization of new rules. Low levels of elite rotation tend to contribute to the resilience of authoritarian regimes. 3 A democratic transition occurs only when an authoritarian government yields power to a new one operating within the new set of rules—something that is unlikely to happen if old elites remain mostly in place.

How pronounced does elite rotation need to be? Some scholars argue that democratic stability and consolidation depend less on the degree to which members of the new elite replace members of the old than on the ability of both groups to reach consensus about the new rules of the game. This view—that the will and capacity to achieve a “pacted” transition are key—is popular among scholars of Latin America who have studied the way regime and opposition moderates in that region have steered transitions from dictatorship to democracy. 4

In contrast, other scholars posit that the institutionalization of new democratic rules only succeeds when new people take charge of key posts. In this view, an old elite that hangs on and even reproduces itself will stifle the growth of counterelites and destabilize the new regime. 5 Regime change will be more effective when members of the new elite fill vital jobs and can advance institutional changes without needing to make crippling compromises with holdover autocratic leaders.

This last scenario aligns with the experiences of postcommunist countries. There, the presence of “democrats in power” at the top correlated strongly with the success of the transition. 6 From the Baltic states to the Czech Republic, people loyal to liberal principles were active in institutionalizing democratic changes and driving the success of democratic consolidation. 7 Czech dissident-turned-president Václav Havel was perhaps the most famous among them. Strong democratic counterelites did not exist in a vacuum, of course. They were more likely to be present—and to exert robust effects—when a country’s civil tradition and potential for self-organization were also potent. The higher a given country could be said to score on all these aspects (strong civil tradition, self-organization potential, and counterelites), the better were its chances of maintaining a stable democracy.

In contrast, countries that were bereft of powerful democrats at transition time—the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan fell into this class—saw democratic practices gain little or no ground, while autocratic reconsolidation was swift. Across the post-Soviet space, the more likely a country was to elect members or associates of the old Soviet nomenklatura to postcommunist offices, the more likely was it also to experience a reversal of any movement toward democracy. 8

How does the largest post-Soviet state, the Russian Federation, fit into this picture? Some studies group 1990s Russia with Moldova and Ukraine as cases of incomplete or compromised democratization, where the balance of power between the old regime and its challengers was so close that electoral democracy became fragile and democratization unstable. 9 I argue, by contrast, that Russia was one of the cases where the old regime retained such a preponderance of power that democratic transition never took place. Reforms were cosmetic. Old Soviet elites and their methods of organizing power relations remained in charge. After a short period of disarray, these elites reasserted their control over society. Russia is not a case of democratic reversal—it is a case of democracy never getting started.

Who Is the Nomenklatura ?

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was never a political party in any regular sense. The CPSU was a state authority structure, the core mechanism of the administrative command system. From the Central Committee in Moscow down to the district and town committees in the localities, CPSU bureaucratic structures were the real ruling bodies of the Soviet state. 10 To ensure centralized control over these bodies and their decisions, the Bolsheviks developed the nomenklatura (literally the “system of names”), which listed all remotely significant bureaucratic and managerial positions in government bodies and state enterprises. Employment in key positions in cultural, media, educational, and other spheres required approval by the CPSU Central Committee. The individuals who filled these posts formed the nomenklatura. They accounted for a tiny fraction of the USSR’s total populace. At its height, the nomenklatura consisted of no more than about three-million people, including family members. 11 At the time the USSR broke up, it had a population nearing three-hundred million. That is, the nomenklatura comprised 1 to 3 percent of the Soviet population.

The selection process for nomenklatura positions was Leninist: deliberately secretive, centralized, top-down, and antidemocratic. It followed Lenin’s advice not to waste time thinking about “the toy forms of democracy,” and “to stop at nothing to [get] rid . . . of an undesirable member.” 12 Thus all posts, even formally elected ones, were filled by candidates whom higher officials had recommended to the electing bodies. For example, anyone who had a chance to become a candidate to serve as secretary of a provincial CPSU committee had been preselected by the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee. The nomenklatura thus became an opaque, monopolizing ruling class of appointees chosen not for their qualifications or potential, but for their readiness to follow orders. They depended on their superiors, obeyed the system, and cared about preserving the status quo that gave them place and privilege in return for unquestioning loyalty.

The experience of being socialized into the nomenklatura had a lasting effect on members’ preferences. The Soviet elite took on a nondemocratic, patronizing role in relation to the public at large. The job of the nomenklatura was not to represent a diverse array of interests from society, but to serve the party-state, performing its tasks and guarding its assets. For nomenklatura members, discipline and conformity were key. Schooling, propaganda, special privileges (such as access to medical facilities or retail stores closed to average Soviet citizens), and the entire social world of nomenklatura members were designed to train them in lasting support for the Soviet ruling apparatus. Anyone showing disloyalty faced expulsion. The ever-present threat of lost status and privileges in a society where the state dominated so much of life ensured elites’ compliance and created strong incentives for nomenklatura members to internalize CPSU ideology.

By the late 1980s, Soviet rulers had grasped the need to change the system. At the top, the USSR had become a gerontocracy. Holding office until death had become the norm for aged and ailing leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, while junior and middling bureaucrats chafed at their blocked career prospects. The gerontocratic system stymied career advancement, and brought few opportunities for social mobility or prosperity. In 1986, the year after Mikhail Gorbachev became CPSU general secretary, the average age of Politburo members reached 68. 13

A mid-1980s oil-price crash worsened chronic problems in the planned Soviet economy. Food shortages and failing grain deliveries spread across the country, including even Moscow, the country’s capital. 14 As the 1990s began, nomenklatura reformists led by Boris Yeltsin—a former member of the CPSU Politburo and a former first secretary of the Sverdlovsk region in the Ural Mountains—were squaring off against most CPSU members, who opposed reforms.

In Soviet Russia, nomenklatura reactionaries controlled the legislative branch, the Supreme Soviet. In March 1990, the first relatively free elections had seen supporters of the old status quo, candidates from the CPSU, defeat the opposition (independents) by winning a crushing 86 percent of seats. Across Eastern Europe, the only place where Communist Party candidates did better in the first postcommunist elections was in the USSR’s Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (soon to become the country of Belarus).

The executive branch—historically more important in Russian politics—was where the reformist nomenklatura found its strength after Yeltsin won the June 1991 presidential election with a resounding 59 percent in a four-candidate field. Yet even in that race, the competition had largely been among contending nomenklatura factions: Five of the six registered presidential candidates had been CPSU members at the time of the election, as had all of the vice-presidential candidates.

The economic crisis and the USSR’s sudden dissolution near the end of 1991 at first deprived Russia’s political leadership of the organization and finances necessary to concentrate political control. In the early 1990s, the central government could not afford the salaries of its security agents and soldiers, let alone its civilian bureaucrats and regional administrators. Delayed wage payments became routine. The inability to maintain control over Russia’s security apparatus undermined the repressive functions of the state machine and fueled a crisis of state legitimacy. For example, in October 1993 President Yeltsin was barely able to convince the military to engage during his confrontation with the Communist-controlled Supreme Soviet. 15

As the crisis weakened the Kremlin’s grip on Russian society, alternative power centers multiplied. For example, to win his battles with Gorbachev and parliament, Yeltsin made multiple concessions to regional elites. Between 1994 and 1998, he signed power-sharing treaties and various related agreements with 46 constituent units in Russia, often offering special prerogatives to individual regions. Economic reforms that shrank the central government’s role in the economy further expanded the space for independent regional actors to emerge.

Elite and Institutional Continuity

Despite the federal center’s partial retreat, changes within state structures remained limited at best. The CPSU Politburo was gone and a small group of economic reformers gained new influence, but at most levels of government and public institutions, the middle- and lower-ranking nomenklatura groups were holding on to power and showing scant interest in any reforms. 16 The organizational structures and bureaucracy from the Soviet era were simply restored almost wholly intact in post-Soviet Russia, albeit under new names.

From Yeltsin himself all the way down to lower ranks, Russian officialdom came straight out of the Soviet nomenklatura. Nearly every executive, representative, regional, economic, and military structure in Russia remained in the hands of those who had run it when the USSR still existed. 17 The Soviet foreign and defense ministries along with many other Soviet-era agencies saw little personnel turnover. The KGB split into the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), but similar Soviet-trained siloviki ran both. My own analysis has shown that through the 1990s, elites rooted in the Soviet nomenklatura filled between 80 and 90 percent of all seats on Russia’s Security Councils, the Federation’s main policymaking bodies. 18

The economic bureaucracy did see some turnover. To assist him with reforms, Yeltsin promoted an influx of newcomers without nomenklatura backgrounds. Their numbers and influence were too limited to bring radical change to the system, however. In the upper ranks of economic policymakers, more than four-fifths (82 percent) of those who had held places in 1988 were still there as of 1993. 19

At the regional as well as the federal level, postcommunist political elites continued to come mostly from middle and higher CPSU ranks. Only scattered oppositionists achieved election wins, and those were limited to big cities: Not a single regional legislature had a majority from outside the old establishment. Across Russia, regional leaders were mostly former Soviet apparatchiks. 20 In the early 1990s, about half of all local-administration heads had worked formerly in Soviet executive or legislative bodies, and another 20 percent had worked in the Soviet apparatus at a lower level. Only about 30 percent came from elsewhere. According to a study by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Soviet nomenklatura members were 78 percent of Russian regional elites in 1992, and still accounted for 66 percent a decade later. 21

The heavy presence of the nomenklatura ensured that the new Russia would still be dominated by many of the old Soviet practices, both formal and informal. Soviet power networks with marked elements of patronage and clientelism transitioned straight into the new Russia. Such practices showed remarkable persistence in post-Soviet politics. Common holdover practices included blat (the use of personal networks and contacts to obtain goods and services); “telephone law” (the custom of executive officials putting backchannel pressure on the courts and legal system); and ponyatia (unwritten rules or “understandings” that govern organizations but are opaque to outsiders). 22

The continuities were not merely generic but literal: It was not a matter of similar types of relationships carrying over from the USSR to the Russian Federation, but of many of the same people in key posts preserving the same relationships with the same longtime partners. Informal governance became key for the operational needs of the new system. For example, in a 1998 survey, 57 percent of elite respondents thought that Soviet connections were “very” or “somewhat” important, and only 6 percent thought them “unimportant.” By 2000, a decade after the fall of communism, about half (47 percent) of elite respondents were still finding Soviet connections important. 23 So many posts were filled on the bases of personal loyalty and connections that outsiders found it hard to gain entry. Most of the newcomers who made it, moreover, had siloviki backgrounds and even links to organized crime. They were not exactly the material of a new and more democracy-friendly governing class.

Soviet political culture persisted in post-Soviet Russia. Holdover Soviet elites had neither the will nor the skill to introduce democratic change. Instead, they remained a nomenklatura, with deeply ingrained habits of loyalty and subordination. Behind a formally democratic façade, Soviet power relations carried on as the order of the day. For example, instead of bringing outsiders into the system, elections became a way to resolve internal conflicts among insiders. That was because successful campaigns required resources and connections that the nomenklatura had a near lock on, with its only occasional rivals being wealthy local businessmen. Even these, however, often had establishment ties and origins that made them more like another nomenklatura subfaction than a democratic counterelite.

At the regional level, elections mostly pitted sitting heads of parliaments against chiefs of regional and city administrations. Nearly all candidates came from the nomenklatura. The federal scene was scarcely different: In the July 1996 presidential runoff, Yeltsin ran against an antireform camp led by Gennady Zyuganov. He had been a deputy head in the old CPSU propaganda department, and was now leading a revived Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Other possible presidential contenders like General Alexander Lebed, Yuri Luzhkov, and Yevgeny Primakov all originated from the  nomenklatura .

Ironically, Yeltsin’s appointments from the federal center had done more than elections to open elite ranks to figures from beyond the nomenklatura. In 1991, Yeltsin had suspended the use of voting to fill regional-administrator posts, and instead named personal representatives to many regions. He did this in no small part because he was frustrated by the lack of elite turnover in the regions. Even so, he relied heavily on officials whom he had known personally in his days as CPSU general secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast, as well as others whom Gorbachev had promoted during the final years of the USSR. Thus the Soviet nomenklatura was the source of many of Yeltsin’s people in the regions.

New Markets, Old Soviet Command Structures

In the early 1990s, Russia’s economic situation was dire. In 1992, as Yeltsin’s acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar administered a “shock therapy” reform package—suddenly ending price controls, freeing trade, stabilizing the currency, cutting the state budget, and selling state assets—to transform the crumbling Soviet economy into a free-market economy.

The persistence of the Soviet elite, however, distorted economic reforms and nascent Russian capitalism. The state was de facto privatizing itself, and allowing state officials to take full advantage of this process. New market relations often relied on the same power networks and practices of informal governance inherited from the Soviet times. 24 An individual’s ties to the old regime produced the strongest payoffs. Nomenklatura members (many of them Moscow-based) had the connections and capital needed to seize the opportunity. They either kept their public positions in order to extract large rents from the emerging private economy or moved from their positions to even more lucrative business opportunities. Directors acquired financial interests in state enterprises that were privatizing under their command.

Data corroborate this. Of the 296 leading business tycoons in the first wave after communism, 43 percent had backgrounds in the Soviet nomenklatura. 25 The individuals running state firms in 1993 were largely the same people who had been managing those firms before 1991, and almost two-thirds of the private business elite in 1993 were former members of the CPSU. 26 Up to 61 percent of new entrepreneurs had once worked for the Soviet state, but even among the remaining 39 percent more than a half belonged to nomenklatura families. 27

The change from Yeltsin to Putin had no adverse effect on the survival of oligarchs with strong Soviet-era nomenklatura ties. In 2001, 41 percent of Russia’s major entrepreneurs had worked in the Soviet power structure. A significant slice of the other 59 percent had family or other ties to the nomenklatura. 28

Russia’s emerging businesses remained highly dependent on benefits or privileges dished out by the government. The new capitalists thus found their interests closely intertwined with those of state officials, with whom they already shared values and nomenklatura origins. Thus, contrary to what modernization theory predicts, the business class was often not a force for democratization. On the contrary, it sought to limit democratic trends and impede further reforms—including in the areas of economic stabilization and privatization—lest these start moving too fast or in directions that officials and their business allies might find troublesome. 29

The Nomenklatura Strikes Back

While Soviet apparatchiks held on atop Russian politics, the shock of the USSR’s collapse and the weakness of the state in the early 1990s did weaken their influence. As the decade wore on, however, they began to recover and reconsolidate. Resenting their loss of social standing in post-Soviet Russia, these groups “were inevitably filled with old-style ideas and attitudes, nostalgic for Russia’s superpower or imperial status.” 30 And as Deputy Premier Sergei Shakhrai said, “Many of them have shed their communist apparel but have not, on that account, become different people.” 31 The apparatchik mindset lingered, as did past patterns of behavior and the desire to preserve a secure and privileged way of life. Small wonder, then, that the restoration of traditional forms of Russian statehood drew nomenklatura support.

As reforms made their painful effects felt and Yeltsin’s approval rating headed south, nomenklatura -linked groups pushed him to stall reforms and dismiss key reformers. In December 1992, the Supreme Soviet with its heavy apparatchik representation forced Yeltsin to fire Gaidar and name as the new premier Viktor Chernomyrdin, a thirty-year CPSU veteran with dense ties to the old order. 32 By mid-decade, the reversal engineered by the so-called nomenklatura party was becoming apparent. Domestic reforms were slowing as foreign policy took on resentful and even revanchist overtones. A symbolic moment came on 24 March 1999, when Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (Chernomyrdin’s successor) heard that NATO had begun bombing Yugoslavia. He was on his way to Washington for a state visit, but ordered his plane to reverse course over the Atlantic and fly back to Moscow.

Yet this trend only gained force with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power as the decade closed and the new millennium began. In the early 2000s, economic growth and rising oil prices improved state finances and organizational capacity, and the Kremlin’s public support rose. There was no longer a need to tolerate the pluralism of the Yeltsin era. Putin then proceeded to eliminate power centers that had emerged when the federal center was weak. He reinstituted control over the regions, coopted the private sector and independent media, repressed opponents, and manipulated elections to a degree that just a decade prior would have been unimaginable.

The response of Russia’s political elites to Putin’s re-autocratization was euphoric. To them, it meant that clear and familiar rules of the game were back—the future had become predictable again. 33 Yeltsin-era uncertainty and instability were gone. Putin restored the bureaucratic hierarchy that the elites knew so well. He made them feel more secure than they had in years.

There were and are pronounced Soviet elements to Putin’s project. Rather than creating new institutions from scratch, Putin chose to restore structures of the old unreformed state that had been weakened but not fundamentally altered. The nomenklatura reverted with relief to governing structures, recruitment methods, and managerial approaches familiar from late-Soviet times, albeit in a more modernized and technocratic form.

For example, Putin had put the legislature under the near-complete control of his United Russia party a few years into his tenure. Not only did United Russia face little parliamentary opposition, but its own meetings came to resemble the congresses of the CPSU: There were long lists of achievements, storms of applause, unanimous acclamations, and party elites’ endless vows of loyalty to the leader and his “general line.” 34 Putin’s tendency to appoint military and security officers to top political posts is also reminiscent of Soviet practices. 35 The size and structure of Putin’s Security Council came to resemble the Soviet Politburo more than Yeltsin’s Security Council. 36 By my own estimate, the Russian Security Council under Putin has steadily drawn at least 70 percent of its members from people with Soviet nomenklatura backgrounds. Other elements of re-Sovietization included the increasingly insular and close-knit character of the elite, its steady multiplying privileges, its paternalistic and domineering attitude toward private business, its drive to renationalize the economy, and even the restoration of Soviet symbols such as the Soviet anthem and portraits of Stalin. 37 The trend has become even more apparent since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022.

That Russia’s re-autocratization increasingly looks like re-Sovietization is hardly surprising given the nomenklatura continuity at the top levels of Russian politics. Soviet apparatchiks, a well-represented group in today’s elite, have simply reverted to familiar patterns. My own analysis has shown that of the top hundred members of the political elite under Putin from 2010 to 2020, around 60 percent had started their careers in the Soviet nomenklatura or had parents who were members. 38 The replacement of the nomenklatura is gradual, as one generation slowly gives way to another. This reflects the stable nature of the system given the absence of revolutionary disruption in elites’ composition. Thirty years after the Soviet system fell, a small elite that in Soviet times never formed more than a tiny fraction of the populace is still holding on to power and social status.

Breakdown versus Transition

Successes of early “third-wave” democratizations in Latin America and Southern and Central Europe led many scholars to equate regime breakdown with democratic transition and to label most subsequently emerging regimes as “new democracies.”

Signaling this confusion was the tendency, in the 1990s and early 2000s, to treat post-Soviet Russia as a case of democratic transition. The persistence and enduring dominance of Soviet-era elites and their formal and informal practices, however, should have cast doubt on this. Such limited liberal changes as Russia experienced were a function of incumbent elites’ temporary weakness combined with their realization that they needed to make some adjustments to the system for the sake of efficiency (a phenomenon dubbed “the revolution of the second secretaries”). 39

Economic crisis left the state unable to pay for patronage, bureaucrats’ salaries, and security forces. Alternative centers of power began rising. The Kremlin had to tolerate competitive multiparty elections, but they yielded no fundamental change: The old Soviet nomenklatura, steeped in antidemocratic norms and habits, remained atop the Russian political system and preserved many formal and informal institutions of the ancien régime. In 1993, former CPSU members made up to 80 to 90 percent of the political elite in Russia. In Poland, by contrast, the comparable figure was 30 percent. In Estonia it was 44 percent, and in Lithuania 47 percent. 40

Thus rather than experiencing a democratic transition, Russia had a period of authoritarian weakness—but even that did not last long. The nomenklatura persisted, and its influence shaped the restoration of autocracy. The 2000s brought a global commodities boom that filled government coffers and enabled the Kremlin to rebuild state capacity. Putin quickly reversed much of the “pluralism by default” 41 that had flourished under Yeltsin. Most Russian elites welcomed this, embracing the end of the Yeltsin era’s seeming chaos and the return of familiar Soviet ways. Civil society barely existed; it could do little to resist the reversal. In the absence of functioning democratic institutions or an organized opposition, the Kremlin was free to abuse power. The re-autocratization took on distinct Soviet overtones as the nomenklatura, which had survived at the pinnacle of the Russian political world, reverted to familiar patterns of behavior.

Countries where autocracy has run into trouble but which lack structural conditions for democracy have seen similar dynamics play out. This has been true in many African countries as well as in the former Soviet space. The current global wave of democratic backsliding has included instances of re-autocratization in countries where democratic changes were never more than cosmetic in nature. Backsliders tend to be countries living in the aftermath of what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call a “democratic moment” that came and went because conditions to sustain it were lacking. In this sense, Russia’s democratic reversal is far from unique. The deck was stacked so heavily against democracy that contingent events mattered little. Thus, even if Yeltsin had chosen Yevgeny Primakov over Putin in 1999, Russia’s democracy would likely not have survived.

Several implications of this argument are worth stressing.

First, studies of transition are too focused on individual leaders. In order to understand transitions better, we must give elite composition more weight. The proliferation of elite-focused datasets in recent years has made this task easier, and will allow us to more reliably predict whether a given democratic transition will succeed.

Second, if democratic institutions are to take hold, there must be elite turnover. To be fair, some carryover of former elites atop new power structures is unavoidable. Barring such elites altogether (even if possible) would be counterproductive: They would become angry spoilers who might lead a full-on antidemocratic reaction. Keeping a society running is always going to require some continuity of personnel. Yet allowing old-regime elites to dominate the upper reaches of the new regime is a recipe for democratic failure. Institutions will not reform, and new democratic rules and methods will fail to take hold. Pushing some degree of elite rotation will therefore be desirable. Western policymakers could assist it by, for example, putting conditions on economic aid to new regimes.

1. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,”  Journal of Democra cy 13 (January 2002): 5–21; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “Elections Without Democracy: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 51–65.

2. Gary A. Stradiotto and Sujian Guo, “Transitional Modes of Democratization and Democratic Outcomes,”  International Journal on World Peace 27 (December 2010): 5–40.

3. Ilia Nadporozhskii, “Influence of Elite Rotation on Authoritarian Resilience,”  Democratization,  21 March 2023,  https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2023.2186401 .

4. Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,”  Comparative Politics 23 (October 1990): 1–21; Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

5. Frane Adam and Matevž Tomšiè, “Elites, Democracy and Development in Post-Socialist Transition,”  Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft  31, issue 1 (2002): 99–112; Iván Szelényi and Szonja Szelényi, “Circulation or Reproduction of Elites During the Post-Communist Transformation of Eastern Europe,”  Theory and Society 24 (October 1995): 615–38.

6. Michael McFaul, “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World,”  World Politics ٥٤(January 2002): 228.

7. Szelényi and Szelényi, “Circulation or Reproduction of Elites,” 623; Anton Steen,  Between Past and Future: Elites, Democracy, and the State in Post-Communist Countries—A Comparison of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (London: Routledge, 1997), 36.

8. Kirill Rogov, “Genesis and Evolution of Post-Soviet Polities” (in Russian), in Kirill Rogov, ed.,  Demontazh kommunizma: Tridtsat let spustja  [The dismantling of communism: Thirty years later](Helsinki: New Literary Review, 2021).

9. Timothy Frye, “The Perils of Polarization: Economic Performance in the Postcommunist World,”  World Politics 54 (April 2002): 308–37; Alfred B. Evans, “The Failure of Democratization in Russia: A Comparative Perspective,”  Journal of Eurasian Studies  ٢ (January 2011): 40–51.

10. Robert C. Tucker, “Post-Soviet Leadership and Change,” in Timothy J. Colton and Robert C. Tucker, eds.,  Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership (London: Routledge, 2019), 9.

11. T.H. Rigby and Bohdan Harasymiw, eds.,  Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 9–10; Michael Voslensky,  Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 148, 92–96.

12. Vladimir I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” trans. Joseph Fineburg (New York: International Publishers, 1935), ch. 4,  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_Is_To_Be_Done%3F_(Lenin,_1935)/Chapter_4 .

13. A.D. Chernev,  229 kremlevskih vozhdej: Politbjuro, Orgbjuro, Sekretariat CK Kommunisticheskoj Partii v licah i cifrah [229 Kremlin leaders: Politburo, Orgburo, Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in faces and numbers] (Moscow: Russika, 1996).

14. Yegor Gaidar, “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil,” American Enterprise Institute, April 2007,  www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20070419_Gaidar.pdf ,  9.

15. Lucan Way,  Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

16. Anton Steen,  Political Elites and the New Russia: The Power Basis of Yeltsin’s and Putin’s Regimes (London: Routledge, 2003), 12, 157–58.

17. Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Legacy in Russian Foreign Policy,”  Political Science Quarterly 134 (Winter 2019): 585–609.

18. Maria Snegovaya and Alexander Lanoszka, “Fighting Yesterday’s War: Elite Continuity and Revanchism,” 10 December 2022,  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4304528 .

19. Michael McFaul, “State Power, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Privatization in Russia,”  World Politics 47 (1995): 210–43.

20. Gavin Helf and Jeffrey W. Hahn, “Old Dogs and New Tricks: Party Elites in the Russian Regional Elections of 1990,”  Slavic Review 51 (1992): 511–12.

21. Olga Kryshtanovskaya,  Anatomii Rossiiskoi Elity [Anatomy of the Russian elite] (Moscow: Zakharov, 2005),  https://vrn-politstudies.nethouse.ru/static/doc/0000/0000/0134/134217.swusdllkvr.pdf .

22. Yuko Adachi, “The Ambiguous Effects of Russian Corporate Governance Abuses of the 1990s,”  Post-Soviet Affairs 22 (January 2006): 65–89; Alena Ledeneva, “Telephone Justice in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 24 (October 2008): 324–50; and Alena Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 196, 213.

23. Steen,  Political Elites and the New Russia, 157.

24. Ledeneva,  Can Russia Modernise? 196.

25. Serguey Braguinsky, “Postcommunist Oligarchs in Russia: Quantitative Analysis,” Journal of Law and Economics  52 (May 2009): 340.

26. Eric Hanley, Natash Yershova, and Richard Anderson, “Russia—Old Wine in a New Bottle? The Circulation and Reproduction of Russian Elites, 1983–1993,”  Theory and Society 24 (October 1995): 654–62.

27. Kryshtanovskaya,  Anatomii Rossiiskoi Elity, 199, 318.

28. Kryshtanovskaya,  Anatomii Rossiiskoi Elity,  184.

29. Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,”  World Politics 50 (January 1998): 203–34.

30. Andrei Kozyrev,  The Firebird: The Elusive Fate of Russian Democracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 150.

31. Tucker, “Post-Soviet Leadership and Change,” 10.

32. Tucker, “Post-Soviet Leadership and Change,”12.

33. Kryshtanovskaya,  Anatomii Rossiiskoi Elity,  122, 167.

34. Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, “The Sovietization of Russian Politics,”  Post-Soviet Affairs 25, issue 4 (2009): 292.

35. “Will the Junta Come to Power? Political Scientist Grigory Golosov Assesses the Likelihood of a Military Regime in Russia,”  Holod, 16 November 2022,  https://tinyurl.com/4x73ajth .

36. Kryshtanovskaya,  Anatomii Rossiiskoi Elity, 150, 161.

37. Maria Snegovaya, “Reviving the Propaganda State—How the Kremlin Hijacked History to Survive,” Center for European Policy Analysis, January 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20220711050031/https://cepa.org/cepa_files/2018-01-Reviving_the_Propaganda_State.pdf .

38. Maria Snegovaya and Kirill Petrov, “Long Soviet Shadows: The Nomenklatura Ties of Putin Elites,”  Post-Soviet Affairs 38 (2022): 329–48.

39. Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, “From Soviet  Nomenklatura to Russian Élite,”  Europe-Asia Studies 48 (July 1996): 722, 729.

40. Szelényi and Szelényi, “Circulation or Reproduction of Elites,” 623.

41. Lucan Way, “Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Political Competition in the Fourth Wave: The Cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine,” World Politics 57 (January 2005): 232.

Copyright © 2023 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

Image Credit: Oxana Onipko/AFP via Getty Images

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Elena Chebankova; Ideas, Ideology & Intellectuals in Search of Russia's Political Future. Daedalus 2017; 146 (2): 76–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00436

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The intellectual discourse of any state can function within two broad paradigms: consensual and pluralistic. In the first case, political elites, intellectuals, and the public agree on the base parameters of what constitutes “the good life” and argue about the methods of application. In the second case, participants hold radically different, incommensurable views, which coexist in society. This essay argues that the Western political system broadly rests on the politics of liberal consensus, formed throughout the period of capitalist modernization. But Russia's history took a different turn, following a path of alternative modernization. This engendered the politics of paradigmatic pluralism, in which a number of radically different politico-intellectual frameworks struggle for the dominant discourse. This essay examines these paradigms and argues that, due to the nature and substance of these models, fundamental change of Russia's dominant discourse, along with its main politico-institutional parameters, is unlikely.

Russia's extant political system is stabilized through the politics of paradigmatic pluralism. More specific, two broad and radically different paradigms of “the good life” are present in Russia: pro-Western liberal and state-centered traditionalist. 1 Their mutual questioning and criticism allow society to function within a relatively stable framework. While the two alternatives have struggled for discursive supremacy, the nativist and state-centered paradigm has emerged as a hegemonic discourse, with the support of the majority of the population. It is focused on avoiding shocks to the extant system and on sustaining sociopolitical stability. This essay demonstrates that the paradigmatic split in Russia has been historically determined. It continues with an examination of the main dimensions of Russia's hegemonic discourse, pointing to its general inclination toward national reconciliation and political stability. It then ponders the potential breakdown of the dichotomous nature of the existing ideological landscape and assesses the chances of a third, more radical alternative capturing the field. The essay concludes that, within the period under review, a fundamental change of the hegemonic paradigm in Russia is unlikely due to the dynamics of Russia's political system.

Until very recent years, the Western political system has mainly rested on the politics of liberal consensus. This implies that society reaches a basic agreement on the idea of the good life within a liberal framework and hopes that there will be a gradual “step-by-step convergence of all values with liberal values.” 2 John Rawls called to establish a “base consensus” that would rest on liberal democratic, cultural, and political notions and act as a basic framework capable of encompassing diverging but “reasonable” ideas of the good life, thus buttressing pluralism of a liberal nature. 3 This thinking has its origins in the monistic tradition of Plato and Aristotle that subsequently merged with monotheistic Christian conceptions to determine much of ensuing Western philosophy. 4

Critics of consensus politics represent a less practiced alternative that calls for the coexistence of incommensurable paradigms of the good life, their incessant dialogue, and mutual enrichment. This is the intellectual posterity of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, advanced in the twentieth century by Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, Jean-François Lyotard, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Bernard Williams, and others. These critics point to the “absolutization” of liberalism by the proponents of liberal consensus politics and advocate the need to introduce meaningfully different alternatives that could enrich the cultural landscape of society. In short, consensus politics seek to operate within one broad politically liberal episteme that houses divergent ideas of an invariably liberal coloring. Pluralistic politics, in turn, have a number of epistemes that struggle to agree on the “base” positions, that propose meaningfully different ideas of sociopolitical development, and that compete for hegemony in the discursive realm.

A paradox of contemporary Russian politics is that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has rested on the pluralistic, rather than the consensus, model, with consequences for the country's intellectual landscape and potential for change to its extant regime. We shall address the participants in these debates as critical intelligentsia. To clarify positions at the outset, we will not limit our understanding of critical intelligentsia to those who are hopeful of altering Russia's extant political system. Rather, the discussion considers all those who ponder Russia's fate – her past, present, and future in its full complexity – as intellectuals. Hence, the account examines the full spectrum of existing opinion, regardless of its support or criticism of the existing political structure.

The two main paradigms of the good life – pro-Western liberal and state-centered traditionalist – struggle for position as Russia's hegemonic discourse. The first intellectual group, which includes some members of the government and financial elite, advocates the path of westernization for Russia. The second group adopts a conservative approach insisting on the creation of a strong state that relies on previous periods of Russia's history and her idiosyncratic political traditions. This paradigm has a pro-Western dimension, but it is a particular kind of westernization. It welcomes almost all aspects of Western modernity related to the capitalist economy, nation-state, religion, and family, but is skeptical about the West's postmodernist path. It also insists on Russia being Western and European but not subordinate to the West geopolitically. Although the pro-Western liberal paradigm is readily available in the current political climate in Russia, it functions merely as a discursive alternative, not as a meaningful option seriously considered by the majority of the population. Permanent dialogue between the two paradigms, as well as the fact that the traditionalist discourse already contains some elements of the Western system, stabilizes the traditionalist discourse and makes unexpected shifts in the country's political trajectory unlikely.

The paradigmatic split and the difficulties experienced by the pro-Western liberal paradigm are rooted in history; things become clearer if we sketch Russia's past three hundred years. First, Russia has a complex relationship with modernity, a social paradigm that largely lends a liberal consensus matrix to the politics of most Western European states. Russia is a second-wave modernization country, a circumstance that predetermines the paradigmatic split. Second, Russia's idiosyncratic relationship with modernity barred her from forming a clear civic identity supportive of liberal consensus politics. Finally, Russia's tumultuous twentieth century further contributed to the consolidation of the existing intellectual rift. Let me elaborate on these factors.

Russia's embrace of Western modernity was rather tardy. The Petrine period (1682 – 1721) was a watershed, during which Russia had only just launched a painful transformation toward modernity, met with resistance from a reluctant population. In contrast, most European countries had already experienced the Reformation and Enlightenment. Russia also lagged behind in industrialization. Western European countries underwent the peak of industrialization during the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. Russia, in contrast, industrialized during the late Tsarist period and in the first half of the twentieth century, part of the Soviet “alternative modernity” paradigm.

In general terms, countries that experienced modernization in the second or third wave have faced the painful political consequences of ideological borrowing. A borrowed idea can be “an asset to the development of a country and a reminder of its comparative backwardness, that is both a model to be emulated and a threat to national identity. What appears desirable from the standpoint of progress often appears dangerous to national independence.” 5 Hence, this cruel dilemma forces a split within the intellectual scene of second-wave industrialization states, of which Russia is part.

Intellectuals of those countries inevitably face an uneasy choice between losing intellectual and cultural independence by admitting their backwardness and adopting the externally borrowed progressive paradigm, or reaffirming nativism and tradition by holding on to the previously chosen path. The drama for Russian intellectuals is in the quandary of either adopting the ideology of individual freedom and bourgeois liberties, combined with embracing Western ontology, or clinging to the idiosyncratic centralized modes of governance that could conduct modernization and development, albeit in a risky alternative fashion. The latter option remains less explored, a problem that Aleksandr Dugin, a Eurasianist philosopher focusing on cultural and geopolitical aspects of the Russian civilization, described as the need for the development of a distinctively Russian epistemology and ontology. 6

Further, Russia's complex experience with modernity impedes the process of forging a civic national identity, which also requires a bourgeois ideological consensus. Bourgeois elites that took the lead in creating the “imagined communities” of civic nation-states promoted the ideas of citizenship and society ( Gesellschaft ) at the expense of the traditional commune ( Gemeinschaft ); civil (economic), political, and social rights; individual liberty; civic responsibility; and representative democracy. These notions gradually formed the cornerstone of the liberal bourgeois base consensus, upon which most modern Western European societies rest. Hence, the idea of civic identity, as well as the civic nation-state, is closely related to the capitalist mode of production and its supporting political institutions. It also represents the cardinal feature of modernity.

Russia's path of “alternative modernity,” engendered by Soviet Communism, featured a different set of values. Bourgeois individual liberties were replaced by the supremacy of community over the individual, the idea of liberating masses of workers in order to dispense with exploitation and enable fairer participation in the life of the community. Equality was understood as social equality, which differed from the Western understanding of equality of opportunity. From this point of view, Russia's alternative modernity has not created a social fabric with an immanent understanding of civic identity and civic nation that rests on the notions of bourgeois individuality, liberal rights, and personal freedoms. This hinders a liberal base consensus and lends credence to the nativist state-centered discourse.

Therefore, while we can successfully identify the Russian state and Russian people, we struggle to pinpoint the dimensions of Russia's civic identity. 7 It comes as no surprise that 43 percent of respondents to a 2011 VTsIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Center) poll did not feel like part of the Russian nation and 20 percent could not understand the very idea of nation. Only 37 percent of respondents felt like part of the nation. 8 Hence, in order to embrace a Western consensus matrix, Russia would first need to adopt a civic identity based on the ideas of individual liberty and a bourgeois nation-state. Russia would next need to embrace modernity's framework of capitalism and liberal base consensus, and then enter the era of postmodernity, with its global civil society and the gradual fading of national identity.

Finally, Russia's two major national catastrophes of the twentieth century exacerbate paradigmatic differences. The first state collapse followed Russia's entry to World War I, which resulted in the fall of the monarchy, disintegration of the empire, and subsequent (Bolshevik) October Revolution. The second major social catastrophe followed the fall of the Soviet Union. The demise of the erstwhile Soviet Empire completed the unfinished disintegration of the Russian Empire, the remains of which the Communists managed to reassemble in the course of the civil war of 1918 to 1921. These two major events contributed to the significant dealignment of Russian and Soviet societies, involving transformations of all societal cleavages, as well as the reconsideration of all preexisting cultural codes and behavioral patterns. Twice in the twentieth century Russia experienced the breakdown of historic myths, demoralization of society, decline in interpersonal and institutional trust, and a significant drop in civic responsibility. The liberal paradigm presided over the March 1917 Romanov abdication, the February Revolution of 1917, and the 1991 disintegration of the USSR.

It has now become clear that Russia's idiosyncratic relationship with modernity and the particularities of its twentieth-century history make the politics of paradigmatic pluralism almost inevitable. This predicament determines the nature of Russia's political discourse, both the hegemonic and the alternative. It is strategically important that Russia's elite allow a dialogue among the alternative discourses, while subtly marginalizing those that lie outside the state-endorsed dominant discourse. Moreover, the state does not try to reach a consensus between liberals and traditionalists, and thus fully embraces the existing divide within society. Various ideological alternatives appear on television, radio, and in print. Radical liberals, foreign journalists, and advocates of 1990s-style policy are daily participants in Russia's main political talk shows. Yet pro-state conservatives usually outnumber and dominate them.

Pro-Western liberal ideas therefore appear peripheral. They act as a reminder that radical alternatives are available and that such alternatives could pose a threat to the extant stability. Hence, high public awareness of the neoliberal paradigm precludes it from being novel to the Russian public. Moreover, despite the paradigmatic pluralism, the 2000s saw the consolidation of a hegemonic discourse through a significant shift toward a political center. Having experienced the state collapse and the obliteration of preexisting values during the 1990s, contemporary Russians are reluctant to embark on radical vicissitudes. They lean toward socioeconomic stability at the expense of radical and, in particular, pro-Western liberal alternatives. This brings us to the nature of Russia's hegemonic discourse.

One cardinal feature of this discourse, and a consequence of the immediate post-Soviet experience, is that it remains open to debate with its counterhegemonic competitors. With the fall of the USSR, a peculiar kaleidoscope of radically different ideas ranging from overtly pro-Western, Euro-Atlantic, socialist, liberal, neoliberal, liberal nationalist, civic nationalist, Stalinist, nostalgically Soviet, and even fascist emerged in Russia to fill the void of erstwhile Soviet uniformity. Economic depression, along with a wealth of opportunities for rapid enrichment, has become a milieu in which such styles, ideologies, and movements develop. The need to survive this radically pluralistic environment from both economic and sociopolitical perspectives taught Russians to be tolerant of paradigmatic differences. Hence, post-Soviet Russians emerged from the collapse of the USSR as pluralistic liberals who welcomed radically different alternatives.

Interestingly, intolerance of beliefs and political radicalism is often a feature of pro-Western radical liberal circles whose views unfortunately do not fit well with the inclinations of the majority. This often results in representatives of the liberal wing blaming ordinary people for self-imposed servility, a lack of civic consciousness, an absence of respect for liberal principles, and disdain for the countries that promote such values. 9 It is also clear that the tactics of radicalizing the discourse impede the chances of a liberal project in Russia. Critics and sympathizers of the liberal cause often appeal to liberal public figures by asking them to reconsider their discursive practices. They implore them to abandon their Russophobia (or anthrophobia) that manifests in shocking journalistic expressions, as well as political profanations, aiming to strike at the heart of Russia's hegemonic discourse.

These voices – in particular Sergei Kurginyan, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and Zakhar Prilepin – advise liberals to center themselves on Russia, turn to defending the country's interests internationally, and abandon the unconditional support of global oligarchy. These critics argue that the failure of the liberal project and de-Sovietization of Russia occurred not because of the nature of the Soviet Union, but because it became clear that alternative policies involved the full-scale deconstruction of Russian society in the interests of Western powers. 10 Simultaneously, critics invoke liberals to develop a Russia-centered liberal epistemology that could challenge the extant political system from all directions without engaging in the destructive practice of national self-denial.

Many moderate liberals accept the need to play down their discourse and narrow disagreements with traditionalists. Russia's great Westernist philosopher, Aleksandr Herzen, once emphasized his affinity with traditionalist Slavophiles: “Like Janus, or a two-headed eagle, we looked in opposite directions, but one heart beats in our breasts.” 11 But today, political scientist Sergei Stankevich regrets, “we have different hearts. It is our task to find ways in which we can rekindle our dialogue in a similar fashion to the dialogue between Westerners and Slavophiles in the 19th century.” 12

Contemporary hegemonic discourse focuses on three notions: 1) the idea of state sovereignty; 2) the ideology of the multipolar world; and 3) the idea of national reconciliation. The multipolar world ideology bears the concept of state sovereignty at its heart. Hence, I will focus on the notion of state sovereignty and combine these points.

Over the past decade, the concept of state sovereignty, seen by the capacity for political development free from external influence, has become the principal unifying factor in Russia. There this idea, much in the classical republican and neo-Roman fashion, invokes civic solidarity, patriotic awareness, and a sense of belonging. Hence, the notions of external freedom and territorial integrity are unconditional “red lines” that Russia's hegemonic discourse is unwilling to relinquish. Russian political scientist Vyacheslav Nikonov argues that only two countries in Europe – Russia and England – enjoy over five hundred years of sovereign independent history. 13 The red lines have been drawn largely by Russia's successful maintenance of its territory and ability to shape its future foreign and domestic policy over such a long period. Painful memories of occasional state collapses further consolidate the desire for sovereignty. Proponents of sovereignty use these examples to argue that grassroots movements would invariably emerge to restore national control over the state just as it happened during the Times of Trouble – the period between the end of the Rurik Dynasty in 1598 and the start of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613 – and at the end of the Russian Civil War. 14

Further, the international atmosphere created by the fall of the USSR also raised debates about state sovereignty. With the collapse, the United States took steps that had the potential to shift the international relations structure toward unipolarity. These have included various “humanitarian interventions,” “regime changes,” and other initiatives used to consolidate America's global leadership. And while global institutional structures remained unchanged, these processes worried Russia's intellectuals and policy-makers. They pondered metaphysical issues invoking questions over international ethics and the direction in which the contemporary world order should evolve.

Russia's hegemonic discourse advocates a multiplicity of the world's political forms and states’ entitlement to independent development. These ideas oppose the Euro-Atlantic universalist logic of globalist democratization. Russia's minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, argues that the ability of states to pursue political cultural distinctness remains the cornerstone of the world's lasting peace. In his September 2015 speech to the Russian State Duma, he advocated creating a more just, polycentric, and stable world order. He claimed that imposing a particular developmental recipe on weaker countries would increase chaos and be met with resistance by many states. 15 Sergei Kurginyan concurs, arguing that many developing countries undergo the phase of incipient modernity ( dogonyayushchii modern ), which the postmodern West, through its foreign-policy actions, dismantles. With this in mind, desovereignization of formerly secular sovereign states in the Middle East triggers the desovereignization dynamic worldwide. This has the potential to result in a new “global disorder” that suits contemporary global capital. 16

A search for national reconciliation is another cornerstone of the hegemonic discourse. It may become tempting to claim that the search for reconciliation would immediately imply a search for a “base consensus” and the desire to dispense with the politics of paradigmatic pluralism. While the construction of a base consensus could significantly overlap with the search for reconciliation, they still represent two qualitatively distinct categories. Reconciliation occurs when the two warring parties accept the existing divide and move forward on that assumption, meanwhile forgiving each other for transgressions that took place in the fight for prevalence. This does not involve forming consensus in ideological terms, which would invariably involve the prevalence of one ideological paradigm at the expense of another. Reconciliation is merely admitting that both sides have different opinions and that there are some issues that nevertheless unite them and help them move forward. Hence, they remain different albeit united on some consolidating grounds.

Those grounds need not be ideological. Proponents of reconciliation consciously avoid the push toward forming an ideological base consensus; neither side should dominate. In his November 4, 2015, speech to the Congress of Russia's Compatriots, Vladimir Putin insisted that the proposed reconciliation should not equate to uniformity in views, but rest on spiritual unity and a sense of belonging to one country united by common history and language. Indeed, history and attachment to a common homeland make people equal participants of the past glories of the nation and members of the same territorial community. There is always an appeal to civic loyalty and national unity in lieu of more divisive ideas such as language, ethnicity, religion, or the ideological treatment of particular elements of political structures. 17

Hence, intellectuals and the general public have formed a clear plan for reconciliation organized around the following points: First, they concur with an idea that contemporary Russia is a direct inheritor of the Soviet Union and that most achievements in the post-Soviet period stem from Soviet times. While the imperial and medieval eras made indispensable contributions to the development of the Russian state, it was the Soviet period that had a decisive impact on how contemporary Russia looks today. Achievements in science, technology, industry, medicine, and health care, the idea of victory in the Great Patriotic War – all derive from the USSR. As does Russia's current social divide between the wealthy and poor, a result of the privatization of Soviet industrial assets. The Soviet period also shapes contemporary Russian anthropology and Russia's collective unconscious. With the quest for consumption and a simultaneous idealistic vision of reality, Russians inherited most of their behavioral patterns from Soviet times. 18

Second, the public must learn of the tragedies of the formative period of the Soviet state. This would require the publication of the real number of victims from the purges of 1921 to 1954. Speculation over the number of victims is unacceptable for both ethical and political reasons. This part of Russia's history must be accepted as a great tragedy and every person who suffered injustice must be vindicated. Nevertheless, society must not focus solely on tragic episodes but also admit positive aspects of the Soviet experience. Russian journalist Maksim Shevchenko has claimed:

The idiosyncrasy of the Russian Revolution lies in the fact that it socially elevated masses of Russian people who were previously considered mere building material for the good life of the few. This process encompassed almost everything: purges of innocent victims as well as great victories and genuine sacrifices of the Soviet people. One historical period contained polar phenomena: monstrous bureaucracy resting on the dominance of the Communist party and the possibility of creating a truly socialist people's governance. The Russian revolution gave people the chance to construct a qualitatively different idea of equality, and our contemporary principles and ethics are direct inheritors of those ideals. 19

Third, the Russian experience of revolution and industrialization must be compared with similar experiences of revolution, civil war, and industrialization in other states. The French Revolution and Reign of Terror usually figure as benchmarks. Russian scholars and commentators, including Sergei Kurginyan, Vitalii Tret'yakov, Natal'ya Narochnitskaya, and Pyotr Tolstoy, have argued that, despite tragic episodes, French people reconciled with the history of their revolution, ensuing terror, and the Napoleonic wars. These intellectuals also call for an examination of the history of revolution and civil war in China, Spain, and the United States. They conclude that civil wars, conservative reactions, and even terrors follow most revolutions and radical transformations worldwide.

This three-point reconciliation strategy reflects a deeply held suspicion that invalidating the Soviet experience could invalidate Russia's contemporary order and lead to the new redistribution of power and property or the territorial disintegration of the state. Many dominant-discourse thinkers argue that de-Sovietization would undo nearly a hundred years of the country's history and lead to the assumption that Russians are not capable of drafting the main structural, cultural, and ideological dimensions of their future. Hence, finding the right balance between admitting to the wrongs of the Soviet period and acknowledging its rights becomes paramount. Russian media carefully treads that line. On the one hand, it denounces Soviet purges in almost every political analysis program. On the other hand, it recognizes Soviet achievements in the spheres of science, medicine, education, and ideological influence on the outside world. More important, the increase in the Soviet component of the discourse does not undermine its westernization. Aleksandr Zinovyev, the late Russian philosopher and émigré of the Soviet era, observed this phenomenon as early as 2000. He argued that a country like Russia would require a strong state with an almost Soviet-like bureaucracy to deal successfully with its challenges. At the same time, the construction of this new state bureaucracy would go hand in hand with increased westernization. 20

Yet this westernization is of a particular kind. The postmodern ideological package promoted by Western powers mostly generates skepticism among ordinary Russians. Looking at the West, Russians lament the growing domination of global oligarchy, “humanitarian” interventions leading to socioeconomic catastrophes, the growing lack of tolerance toward alternative opinions dressed in political correctness, and the substitution of real debate with media simulacra. In this light, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claims that Russia does not reject but upholds Western values. Thus, in a contemporary world, Russians perceive that their nation has become the true defender of the ideals that erstwhile defined the period of Western liberal modernity. 21

The final question concerns the stability of the extant balance between the moderate statist and liberal paradigms. How durable is their symbiotic coexistence and what could a legitimacy crisis, induced by either serious economic decline or a political succession, lead to? Here we should consider an outcome in which a revanchist and radical-chauvinist force dominates the scene. Though unlikely now, such a scenario was not a distant possibility throughout the past decade. Indeed, a more nuanced approach to Russia's ideological landscape would allow the exploration of a third, albeit minor, option. This discursive paradigm is often referred to as “political nationalism” or the “third force.” 22 It is focused on a radical agenda of repudiating external and internal enemies and advancing a project of “greater Russia.” This force comprises diverging trends with wide-ranging ideological positions. Yet its representatives usually acknowledge Russia's discursive division of liberals and statist patriots and blame the Kremlin for being indecisive in repudiating the liberals.

They invoke the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, ex-president of Ukraine, who simultaneously pursued European-integration and politicoeconomic ties with Russia. This inconsistency, advocates of the third paradigm argue, ultimately led to Yanukovych's demise, and the Kremlin's inconsistency toward domestic liberals and the West could result in Russia's own liberal maidan revolution. 23 These ideologists claim that the Kremlin must steer toward a “patriotic” trajectory and abandon futile attempts to reach a dialogic balance with the liberals. 24 It is unacceptable, they claim, both that the statists’ discourse contains substantial chunks of liberalism and that Russia's main media channels and state socioeconomic policies advance these positions. Russia, in their view, must adopt a steady line toward the national revival and cease “appeasing” the West by openly declaring it as an existential enemy rather than a dialogical partner.

Initially, such a radical approach may seem marginal. However, many observers claim that large segments of Russia's financial, political, and special services elite – who come across as liberal or conservative in public – had shared in this ideology in private, at least until the Crimean and Donbas events. 25 In the aftermath of the 2005 Ukrainian Orange Revolution, it does not come as a surprise that the Kremlin viewed the nationalists as a tactical ally that could stabilize the extant political system and defend it from external interference. Therefore, this third cohort is substantial, uniting members of patriotic, liberal, monarchical, and even fascist opposition. As a political force, nationalists divided into two separate categories. The first group expected the restoration of the Russian Empire and advocated territorial expansion. The second wished for the creation of an ethnic Russian state and envisaged sacrificing some of Russia's ethnic territories in order to see this goal through.

However, this once-promising third force, buttressed by the silent support of financial elites and special services, gradually began losing its discursive niche. Some analysts claim that by 2016, nationalists had become so marginalized and fragmented that they could not meaningfully discuss participation in the forthcoming parliamentary or regional elections. 26 The emerging rift with the Kremlin, disagreements with the liberals, and the Crimean crisis all helped alter the discursive scene in Russia. As for the Kremlin, it subsequently sensed the danger associated with flirting with nationalists. The apparent failure of nationalists to protest against the West and their preoccupation with internal immigration indicated that, instead of protecting Russia's political regime from Western interference, this radical force had the potential to turn its guns against the Kremlin itself. The first signs of rupture between the Kremlin and nationalists took place in 2007 – 2008, when the state adopted a range of punitive measures against ethnic hatred and extremism. The immigration process was systematized, the judicial review for racial crimes was revised, and the dissemination of xenophobic literature was restricted. Political nationalists then fully emerged as a radical stronghold of the nonsystemic opposition to the Kremlin.

Nationalists still had a chance to unite with radical liberals and form a single front against the statists. This would have granted them an opportunity to survive as a meaningful discursive paradigm. It does not come as a surprise that during the December 2011 protests, liberals worked with nationalists and formed a single anti-Kremlin front. The nationalist cohort hoped to capitalize on the shortcomings of the Kremlin's policies in the international arena as well as on the state's inability to tackle corruption and the economic crisis. Nationalists promoted two broad agendas that the liberal cohort has generally approved. The first agenda focused on the relationship between Central Russia and the North Caucasus and advanced the “Stop feeding the Caucasus” campaign, which sought to end Russian federal government spending on the region. The second agenda item was the general anti-immigration campaign geared toward the introduction of the visa regime with the Central Asian republics.

However, the events in Crimea and Donbas turned the tables radically, virtually obliterating this third discourse. Many nationalists initially supported the 2014 Maidan Revolution, attracted by the fact that their Ukrainian equals played a decisive role in the change of the Ukrainian political regime. Yet they quickly faced disappointment, given that the Ukrainian Revolution took on an anti-Russian ideological coloring. 27 The subsequent outbreak of the bloody conflict in Donbas led these nationalists to adopt a radically pro-Russian agenda, arguing in favor of Russia's direct military involvement in rescuing the “Russian world” in eastern Ukraine. This policy, however, resulted in further disappointment, for the mobilization potential of Russian nationalists was minimal and they were not able to attract a substantial number of volunteers who would agree to take up arms for this cause. 28 This was mainly linked to the fact that Russia's general public was not in favor of the country's direct military involvement in the conflict and wished only to support the Russian population in eastern Ukraine rhetorically. This led to a significant narrowing of the discursive niche in which nationalists could engage.

Further, the political field previously occupied by the revanchist ideologists has been gradually taken over by moderate liberals and statists. Following the failure of the December 2011 protests, moderate liberals began appealing to values with social currency, praising patriotism, proclaiming their “love of the motherland,” and supporting development of the welfare state. This trend deepened in the wake of events in Crimea. The overwhelming majority of Russians backed the Kremlin and by doing so squeezed the liberal support base. This partly made the liberals accept the advice of their statist opponents to soften their stance toward the “people.” The statists also intensified their patriotic rhetoric, seeing it as a useful tactical instrument in the struggle for the dominant discourse. Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov has argued that contemporary Russia remained a non-ideological state, thus adhering to our initial proposition of paradigmatic pluralism. Yet Russia obtained, Karaganov continued, the two consolidating ideas of sovereignty and defense, which united under the overarching notion of “patriotism.” 29 This deprived nationalists of their habitual playground.

The fragmentation and weakness of the potential third force was demonstrated by its proponents’ most recent attempt to set aside internal ideological differences and unite into a single group. The January 25 Committee, established in 2016, represents a union of extremely diverse and largely incompatible forces. It includes monarchists led by Igor Strelkov, radical national democrats represented by Konstantin Krylov, National Bolsheviks led by Eduard Limonov, ultra-nationalist fascists such as Yegor Prosvirnin, and oppositionist former security service officers such as Anatolii Nesmiyan. This ideologically diverse group supports irredentist claims of ethnic Russians in the post-Soviet space and the idea of establishing an ethnic Russian state based on the principles of justice, legality, and equality.

Members of the Committee are driven by their mutual detest of liberalism and the West and the search for internal enemies within the Russian state apparatus. The slide of Russia's third discourse, from a formerly promising political force to a marginalized group of intellectuals with dubious goals, is perhaps unfortunate for those who wished to create a sustainable political paradigm within this field and move it in a moderate direction. Yet their current political weakness suggests that the arrival of representatives of this paradigm in the highest echelons of Russia's power is unlikely, even within the conditions of economic and political crisis.

A radical change that could fundamentally alter the political situation in Russia seems an unlikely prospect. Extraordinary as it may seem, at this point, Russia has run out of revolutionaries. First, contemporary Russia functions within the conditions of a paradigmatic pluralism that makes a vast number of options readily available. The presence of different paradigms in the mass media and public debate precludes the situation, in which a system-deposing paradigm could arrive unexpectedly, appearing more just and novel, and radically changing the hegemonic discourse. Despite the wealth of different paradigms, the state-centered conservative episteme won the hegemonic discourse; the majority of Russia's population and her intellectuals support it. The main stabilizing feature of this discourse is that it does not seek ideological uniformity and welcomes various alternatives within the debate on domestic politics. It has little appeal to values and seeks national reconciliation. This discourse is also foreign-policy centered and, for that reason, has an overall consolidating effect. In addition, it is more open to debate than its liberal counterpart, which is often intolerant of nonliberal (but not illiberal) alternatives. Indeed, pro-Western liberals subconsciously feel that their paradigm may prevail only through the full and radical recasting of public consciousness that cannot take place overnight or even within a short period.

To realign the system fundamentally, one would need to dispense with the politics of paradigmatic pluralism and instill a new consensus, which could only be achieved via authoritarian means and would go against the grain of popular wishes. Considering the decisive liberal turn, those who anticipate that a changing regime in Russia would bear fruit and move the country in the direction of full integration into the Euro-Atlantic community overlook the fact that such a change could only be temporary. For this development to take full effect and result in a fundamental change, Russia would need the necessary conditions to form the liberal base consensus and move away from the politics of paradigmatic pluralism. This can only take place gradually through progressive accumulation of liberal capitalist behavioral patterns, a few generations of steady development in the modernist fashion, and the construction of the main dimensions of Russia's civic nation. The fifteen-year phase pondered in this volume thus does not allow sufficient time for a fundamental change of this magnitude.

In philosophical terms, such paradigms of the “good life” can be seen through the Aristotelian lenses of spiritual, virtuous, and prudent politics that can ensure the welfare and flourishing of humans.

Stuart Hampshire, “Justice is Strife,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 65 (3) (1991): 24 – 25.

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

John Gray, Berlin (London: Fontana Press, 1995); and Bernard Williams, In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in the Political Argument (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Reinhard Bendix, Embattled Reason: Essays on Social Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 352.

Aleksandr Dugin, “Rossiiskaya identichnost’ v sovremennom mire,” lecture at the Ural Polytechnic University, 2012.

Otkrytaya Studiya with Nika Strizhak , “Kto my: Russkiye ili Rossiyane?” March 21, 2012, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmlspuJ5AU8 (accessed January 17, 2017).

Vadim Slutskii, “Proryv gnoinika,” Ekho Moskvy, March 6, 2014, http://echo.msk.ru/blog/vadimslutsky/1273246-echo/ .

Paul Rodkin, “Pochemu desovetizatsiya dala obratnyi effekt,” RIA Novosti , May 21, 2015, http://ria.ru/zinoviev_club/20150521/1065729530.html .

Bendix, Embattled Reason , 352.

Duel with Vladimir Solovyov , “Kurginyan vs Nadezhdin,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE1Na64gQ8U (accessed November 17, 2015).

Pravo Znat! “Vyacheslav Nikonov,” November 7, 2015, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j64b91T4ss (accessed November 12, 2015).

Duel with Vladimir Solovyov , “Kurginyan vs Nadezhdin.”

“Vystupleniye Lavrova v Gosdume,” https://russian.rt.com/article/123511 , October 14, 2015.

Spetsial'nyi korrespondent , September 29, 2015, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6I5cZD4Eyw (accessed January 3, 2017); and “Kurginyan: SShA – Novyi Karfagen, ustraivayushchii khaos po vsemu miru,” Regnum , September 30, 2015, http://regnum.ru/news/polit/1982223.html .

Bendix, Embattled Reason , 353.

Tochka Zreniya , “Velikii Oktyabr’ i sovremennost',” November 7, 2015, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLLBYqMvRM (accessed January 3, 2017).

Rodkin, “Pochemu desovetizatsiya dala obratnyi effekt.” A number of Russian intellectuals note that, from their perspective, Vladimir Putin and his elite are pro-Western, with Sergei Kurginyan branding Putin as a liberal statesman.

Spetsial'nyi korrespondent , September 29, 2015.

Valery Solovei, “Bol', gnev i nenavist'. Tri uroka russkim natsionalistam iz ukrainskogo krizisa,” Slon , March 21, 2016, https://slon.ru/posts/65611 .

Igor Strelkov, “Dlya spaseniya Rossii my sozdayom tretyu silu,” Dvizheniye Novorossiya , January 31, 2016, http://novorossia.pro/strelkov/1552-igor-strelkov-dlya-spaseniya-rossii-my-sozdaem-tretyu-silu.html ; and Igor Strelkov, “My protivostoim liberal'nomu revanshu,” Kolokol Rossii , January 29, 2016, http://kolokolrussia.ru/russkiy-mir/igor-strelkov-m-protivostoim-liberalnomu-revanshu?_utl_t=fb# .

Eduard Limonov, “Prizrak, brodivshii po Rossii materializovalsya,” Svobodnaya pressa , February 4, 2016, available at http://svpressa.ru/politic/article/141645/ (accessed January 16, 2017).

Solovei, “Bol', gnev i nenavist'”; and Sut igry , “Khvatit kormit’ Kavkaz: Sergei Kurginyan ob etoi idee,” 2011, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUfBSi86Xa4 (accessed April 1, 2016).

Solovei, “Bol', gnev i nenavist'.”

Limonov, “Prizrak, brodivshii po Rossii materializovalsya.”

Sergei Karaganov, “Mir nakhoditsya v predvoyennom sostoyanii,” Rossiya v global'noi politike , February 17, 2016, http://www.globalaffairs.ru/pubcol/Mir-nakhoditsya-v-predvoennom-sostoyanii-17999 .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Authoritarianism in Russia

Introduction.

• Authoritarianism
• Traditional Russian Authoritarianism—Tsarist Rule
• The Political System
• Stalinism’s Impact on Society
• Failed Democratization
• Putin’s Authoritarianism

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Authoritarianism in Russia by Joel M. Ostrow LAST REVIEWED: 12 October 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0205

In January 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, analysts and observers inside Russia and out anticipated the rise of democracy and open politics in a country whose history had only known authoritarianism. The demise of communism had brought transformation toward democracy and market capitalism to many of the states of East Central Europe, and the same was expected to occur in Russia. Indeed, it was liberalizing reforms under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, that triggered the eventual collapse of communist regimes. Russia’s new charismatic, populist leader, President Boris N. Yeltsin, emphatically proclaimed Russia to be the most significant cog in a new global wave of democratization that would unite Europe. On the surface, actions seemed to confirm these hopes with the adoption of a new constitution; competitive elections for representative bodies at the national, regional, and local levels, and for leaders such as the president, governors, and mayors; and the rise of an entirely free and vibrant print and electronic mass media. The economic sphere mirrored these social and political changes with establishment of free markets and privatization of former state enterprises. International affirmation came with Russia’s inclusion in a new G8, expanded cooperation with NATO, and a wide range of new global political and economic partnerships. The end of the Cold War brought euphoria over a new era of globalization and democratization, expressed in such events as the coalition to oppose Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the end of apartheid in South Africa, and myriad other examples of which Russia’s democratization seemed the inevitable culmination. But this optimism masked the challenging realities of Russian politics, and by 2000 the hopes were firmly dashed when Yeltsin resigned and appointed a former KGB official as President of Russia. Vladimir V. Putin immediately took advantage of a lack of constitutional and institutional protections and dismantled all vestiges of democracy, restoring Russia to an increasingly strong and uncompromising authoritarian regime.

General Overviews

There is no shortage of books, including classic academic studies, on the subject of dictatorship and authoritarianism, but precious few offer clear definitions of either term. Rather, what one finds most frequently are negative definitions contrasting them to democracy, which itself is a term plagued by overuse and lack of consistent definition, including by many scholars, who invoke it. Ostrow, et al. 2007 (cited under Failed Democratization , see p. 6) defines democracy as a political system that “ensures popular control over the state,” through elections but also through institutions guaranteeing ongoing transparency, accountability, and open competition. By contrast, dictatorship is a system in which “how politics are conducted is determined by a single individual,” who imposes decisions “on a populace denied the political freedom to organize, compete and hold leaders accountable electorally or otherwise.” Whether using a minimalist definition of democracy as a political system featuring free and fair elections of officials, or the more expansive one articulated here, Russia does not and never has had a democratic political system. Its history has been of authoritarian rule and dictatorship, as defined here.

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This op-ed was written by Witold Rodkiewicz, who attended the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative titled “ Bear With Us: What Is to Be Done About Russia? ” from October 18 to 21, 2023.

In this brief and very subjective essay, I will concentrate on those features of contemporary Russia’s political and social landscape that are often misunderstood by Western observers.  These misunderstandings are due to fundamental differences between Russian and Western assumptions about politics and society.  Russian political culture and social mechanisms are often based on assumptions that contradict Western (especially in its liberal variant) beliefs about what is “natural” and “normal”.

Putinism as a neo-totalitarian system 

With the outbreak of the war, the Putin system has acquired a number of features that give grounds to describe it as neo-totalitarian.

First of all, one can observe the further concentration and centralization of power in the hands of President Putin and the weakening position of other top functionaries of the system.

Second, with the adoption of new legislation further restricting freedom of speech and with stepped-up repression of the so-called non-systemic opposition, which reduced the space for independent political or even quasi-political activity almost to zero, the degree to which the system relies for its survival on direct repression, as opposed to manipulation and propaganda, has grown significantly. 

Last but not least, the fundamental principles of the “Putin system” before the war was an implicit “deal” between the state and the society according to which the people kept out of politics while the state kept out of the private lives of its citizens. After the breakdown of the war, the state began to increasingly encroach into the private sphere and started to demand an active demonstration of support for the war and the war effort from citizens. It was also accompanied by an intensification of propaganda and the creation of an official messianic ideology according to which, Russia’s mission is to liberate the non-Western world from the colonial and neocolonial exploitation by the West and protect it from Western aggressive designs to impose its post-modern values. This is accompanied by an introduction of ideological indoctrination at all levels of the education system and by the introduction of standardized and revised history textbooks. Advanced militarization of society, including children through the Yunarmiya youth organization, may be considered another sign of the neo-totalitarian nature of the political system. 

This system has three weaknesses. First, it lacks a tested mechanism for power succession. With the constitutional amendments made in 2022, this problem was kicked forward but not solved. Second, it restricts the information that is passed to the top and thus increases the probability of the adoption of faulty or misguided policies. Third, it makes the system hard but brittle: in a crisis, there is a high chance that if faced with a serious internal crisis, the system is likely to collapse, similar to how the Russian monarchy collapsed in February 1917 and the Soviet system collapsed after the August 1991 putsch attempt.

Russian society

Russian society is extremely variegated and fragmented in a way that prevents it from formulating a common agenda and makes it very difficult to mobilize it for political purposes. There is a huge gap between the middle class in capital cities, which are large urban centers, and the population living in the provinces, small towns, and countryside.

The majority of the population shares what I would call a pre-modern attitude towards politics, meaning it is deferential to the powers that be, it is basically non-political, i.e. it assumes that politics is the game for elites and that the authorities “know better”. It is pervaded by a deep sense of helplessness against the power of the state and the futility of any attempts at collective action directed against it. It shares with the elites the preference for the patron-client personalistic model of social interaction. This is fostered by low social capital, including a distrust of formal institutions and procedures and suspiciousness towards other individuals. These attitudes are rooted in what might be called a pre-Enlightenment view of human nature as sinful which translates into an assumption that social relations tend to be based on the principle “homo homini lupus” (man is wolf to man). Individuals therefore cannot be trusted to enjoy too much freedom because they are likely to misuse it to harm each other. Hence, a necessity for a strong state that would ensure stability and protect individuals from each other. 

Incidentally, this Darwinian view of social relations is also projected onto the international arena. Hence, the Russian population automatically accepts the claims of the Kremlin propaganda that “the West” has consistently sought to “harm” or “destroy” Russia to capture its natural resources. Both the Russian society and Russian elites subscribe to the notion that Russia historically was always on the “good side” and made sacrifices for the benefit of others. Hence, any criticism or suspicion of Russia’s intentions is a sign of “Russophobia” and ingratitude. Unlike Western societies, Russian society still believes in the intrinsic goodness of Russian imperialism; they are convinced that other people always joined the Russian state voluntarily and that Russian rule was always beneficial. Moreover, Russians never exploited their imperial possessions; on the contrary, they always subsidized them to their own detriment.

The Russian society clearly shares with the elites the deep fear of instability and a conviction that there is nothing worse than a revolution in the form of radical and violent political change. Any political regime is better than its breakdown. The prevailing attitude is the fear of change based on the assumption that change is likely to lead to the deterioration of the situation of “the little man” rather than to its improvement.This is combined with a distrust of democratic mechanisms as likely to be inefficient, beneficial to a narrow elite of political activists, and likely to produce chaos rather than pragmatic solutions leading to improved welfare of the “little man”.  This attitude has been reinforced by the memories of the early 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet system combined with Gaidar’s economic reforms led to widespread pauperization and the feeling of existential insecurity.  

Paradoxically, the authoritarian political system, the aim of which is the exploitation of the population by the elite, has been largely built by the elite’s skillful manipulation and exploitation of attitudes and values that are intrinsic to large sections of the Russian population. 

From that unhappy but sober and realistic picture at least five conclusions seem to follow:

• The negative consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine and its conflict with the West are unlikely to lead to massive and effective opposition to Putin and his ruling cohort
• Even if there is change at the very top, such as if Putin is replaced or followed by a form of “collective/oligarchical” leadership this will not lead to a democratization of the political system
• Politics in Russia is going to remain elite-driven and authentic, spontaneous grass-roots movements are unlikely to emerge
• The West will never be able to beat the Russian elites in the game of influencing or manipulating the Russian population
• Significant change in the political system in Russia is likely to come only in a mutation-like form caused by external factors like a crushing and undeniable defeat in a major conflict, which would force the Russian elites to fundamentally revise the Russian political culture

Witold Rodkiewicz was an analyst at the Centre for Eastern Studies and is now an adjunct professor at the Centre for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw. He received his M.A. in History from the University of Warsaw and his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University.  

Witold attended the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative titled “ Bear With Us: What Is to Be Done About Russia? ” in October 2023. This program enabled experts to convene at Salzburg Global Seminar for a high-level dialogue exploring scenarios and questions about what options exist to engage, contain, and hold Russia accountable in a post-war context.

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Russia’s role in world politics: power, ideas, and domestic influences

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• Published: 03 May 2018
• Volume 56 , pages 713–725, ( 2019 )

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• Neil MacFarlane 2  

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Russia’s role in world politics has become the object of a spirited debate among policymakers, think-tank analysts, and academics. Much of this debate focuses on one central question: What are the main drivers, or causes, of Moscow’s increasingly proactive and assertive foreign policy? The purpose of this special issue is to address this question by focusing on the interplay of power, ideas, and domestic influences. Our introductory article sets the scene for this analytical endeavor. More specifically, the article has three aims: (1) to review the existing explanations of Moscow’s assertiveness; (2) to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and benefits of employing eclectic approaches in the study of Russian foreign policy; and (3) to outline the contributions of the articles that follow.

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Götz, E., MacFarlane, N. Russia’s role in world politics: power, ideas, and domestic influences. Int Polit 56 , 713–725 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-018-0162-0

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4: The Political Development of the Russian State

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The Origins of the Modern Russian State

While the modern nation of Germany did not emerge as a unified territorial state until 1870, a territory comparable to modern Russia existed by the middle of the 17th century. It was under the rule of Ivan III (The Great) and Ivan IV (The Terrible) that Russia expanded to include parts of modern Poland and Ukraine, as well as much of its post-Soviet territory. Ivan IV declared himself Tsar in 1547 and consolidated control over Russia’s feudal noble class with brutal repression. Peter the Great ruled from 1689-1725; he modernized the state and military and Russia became a powerful nation within the emerging system of states in Europe.

During these periods of consolidation and wider territorial control, Russia developed several characteristics as a great power that had important consequences for the development of its state over the next several centuries and into the 21st century as well. While Peter the Great modernized the state through the establishment of a stronger bureaucracy, the civil service positions were concentrated in the nation’s small noble elite. Unlike in Britain and Germany, Russia’s landed elites were not wealthy. Individual holdings tended to be small and remained under conditions of feudalism until the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861. Peter and subsequent Tsars sought to keep the nobles dependent on the modest wages of their civil service positions. Whereas landed elites in Germany and Britain became important sources of wealth and investment capital that fueled industrialization, Tsarist rule constrained similar development. Thus, the commercial powers and forces that were transforming Western and Central Europe were largely absent in Russia. Among the great powers of Europe in the 18th and 19th century, Russia was  militarily powerful, because of its size and population, but economically weak; it has remained so in many ways up to the present. While Europe was urbanizing, Russia remained an overwhelmingly feudal society. Small elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg interacted with the networks and processes of the larger European culture, but the vast majority of the population were illiterate peasants locked into serfdom. While it retained its great power status, it fell further behind the rest of Europe over time.

Another significant source of cultural and state unity was the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia believed that it was the ‘third Rome,’ or the true center of Christianity after the fall of Rome, and the Byzantine Empire. Orthodox Christian doctrine was the official religion of the Russian state and a central way in which Tsars legitimized their power. It became the central unifying force by which some Russians leaders and intellectuals drew a strong distinction between “western” civilization, and a unique and separate Russian identity. A Westernized urban elite pushed back against these conservation forces, generating tensions between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles. ” Most movements for reform, including the Decembrists of the 1830s, and more radical socialist and communist movements later in the 19th century, came from the small urban population. The tsar had his own secret police force to root out these liberal and radical reform movements. The vast cultural divide between these elites and the mass of illiterate serfs made building support among the masses for such movements very difficult. Even after Tsar Alexander (1855-1881) emancipated the serfs in 1861, peasants were tied to the land. Despite legal freedom from their landlords, the serfs were legally required to pay a land tax to the lords’ overtime that would eventually lead to land ownership. However, the serfs made little money and still had to work the land to survive. These so-called redemption payments were not abolished until 1907. Peasants continued to live in small village level cooperatives providing little basis for the expansion of production and commerce in agriculture .

Playing Catch up: Modernization/Industrialization

Prior to the middle of the 19th century, most modernization efforts undertaken by Tsars focused on military and administrative reforms but left Russia's feudal socio-economic structure firmly in place among the country’s vast rural population. A major catalyst for Russian industrialization and economic development was the loss of the Crimean War to the British in 1854-1856. The war clearly underlined serious economic weakness in the Russian state which undermined its military preparedness. As it had in the Opium Wars against China, the British displayed a technological superiority that reflected the impact of industrialization.

In response, Tsar Alexander Ii sought a path of rapid industrialization. He began by the emancipation of serfs on privately held lands in 1861 and state held lands in 1866, in hopes of freeing them for commercial agriculture or industrial employment. As with Germany, the country was trying to play “catch-up” with Britain. Unlike Germany, however, Russia did not have an equivalent of the Junkers, the Prussian landed elite whose wealth helped fuel Germany’s rapid and successful industrialization. Tsars had kept their own landed elite dependent on state employment in the bureaucracy. Russia was thus required, as were many other nations who sought to industrialize in the 20th century, to seek foreign investment, which came largely from Britain and France. Russia was also hampered by its class structure; it had a very small middle class and conditions in the countryside still tied many peasants to their villages. Where rapid development of commercial agriculture in Britain and Germany had forced peasants into cities and factory work, Russia’s feudal structures continued to constrain the process. The communal land holding institution known as the mir remained a large part of the societal make-up of Russia and deeply ingrained in their daily life even after the formal end of feudalism.

Industrialization policies focused on large scale production of items such as coal, textiles, oil, and iron. The construction of the Trans-Siberian railway opened up the possibilities of internal trade. While these policies generated significant economic growth, Russia's internal social and political weaknesses limited their impact. The cultural and economic divide between the urban and rural areas widened. Many peasants were unwilling or unable to leave for opportunities in the cities. An industrial working class did develop but the workers quickly became discontented with oppressive working conditions and limited rights, resulting in frequent strikes. The Tsars forces severely repressed these efforts, imprisoning or exiling the leaders, some of whom would later lead the Russian Revolution. The limits of these efforts, and the distance Russia still had to travel to catch up with its competition became clear in humiliating fashion in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war. The East Asian nation, pursuing policies modeled on Britain and Germany, also carried a process of rapid economic modernization after 1868. The war displayed the fruit of that process when Russia had to surrender and accept expanded Japanese influence in Northeast Asia.

In response to this shocking military defeat, disgruntled workers and military personnel, spurred on by radical movements, led a failed revolution in 1905. Wide spread strikes during this time slowed industrialization even more. In response to this, the Tsar Nicholas II created a constitutional monarchy and, almost 700 years after the Magna Carta led to the creation of the English Parliament, established the Duma as a parliamentary body. Election rules gave the vote to all men over 25 and a wide range of political parties emerged, though most of the more radical parties including the Communist Bolsheviks boycotted the elections. However, Nicholas II and his Prime Minister dissolved the Duma after 73 days. The tsar permitted elections to a second Duma in 1907 and the radical party participated this time and won seats; it managed to last 103 days until the Tsar ran out of patience with the efforts of legislators to wrest real power from the Russian monarch. This cycle of election followed by dissolution of the Duma occurred twice more before the onset of World War I in 1914.

If war had not come, it is possible that Nicholas II would have gradually developed more tolerance for parliamentary power. It is important to note that the Duma was established in an age when universal mass suffrage was the expectation. While participation of the full peasantry remained limited, elections to the Duma were generally comparable in their level of participation to those elsewhere in Europe including Britain. (That was not the case in 1215 in England). Prime Minister Peter Stolypin did carry out reforms that freed serfs from some of the remaining vestiges of feudalism. He hoped thereby to stimulate the development of a class of small farmers and stronger commercial agricultural markets. Russia might have remained a weaker but growing economy, illiterate peasants might eventually have started to make some real progress, and a more liberal political system might have slowly taken hold. It is also possible another revolutionary movement would have emerged like in 1905, but until this point repressing radicalism had been the one thing Tsarist regimes had been consistently good at. Radicals might have chosen to try to get a foothold in the political system through increased participation in the Duma. Revolutions always seem inevitable in retrospect and the victors shape the narrative to strengthen that. However, revolutions are complex processes that no movement ever fully controls, which is why they are relatively rare.

However, war did come, and with it the destruction of the Russian monarchy and the political and economic order it had created. The challenge of trying to fight the technologically and militarily far superior German army simply proved too great. By the beginning of 1917, the Tsarist state collapsed. Soldiers without food or ammunition deserted en masse . After refusing to recognize the reality and negotiate a ceasefire with the Kaiser’s forces, Nicholas II abdicated his throne in February 1917. A “Provisional Government” made up of moderate parties and monarchists tried to hold the country together while continuing to fight the war against Germany. Had the leaders of that government sought peace and focused on stabilizing the country, it is quite possible the Russian Revolution would never have occurred. The forces that the revolution brought to power were initially weak and had a limited political base. But that slowly changed as the collapse of the state continued and a political vacuum emerged. That vacuum made the revolution possible.

Revolution in Russia

Revolutionary movements had been part of Russian society for most of the 19th century. The first revolutionary movements began developing as young elites were becoming more and more educated. These individuals generally went outside of Russia to receive their educations and returned with a broader perspective on the need for political and economic reform. These elites became the basis of a small intelligentsia fully aware of the political ideologies emerging in the rest of Europe. The first call for revolution came from the Decembrists in 1825 when they unsuccessfully demanded a constitutional monarchy.

Later revolutionaries drew on the ideas of a broad array of socialist and anarchist thinkers in Europe, including Karl Marx and Frederic Engels. Marx and Engels advocated for collective ownership of the means of production via socialist and communist revolutions. They theorized that a capitalist economy would be overthrown by a socialist revolution and then communism would emerge from the socialist society. The first Marxist group formed in 1883 and called themselves the Emancipation Labor Group . They believed that the western styles of industrialization produced disillusionment within working classes, and that the western factories were inherently unjust. In 1903, the Russian Social democratic Labor Party, or the RSDLP splintered into two factions. These two factions were the Bolsheviks, or the majority; and the Mensheviks, or the minority. Vladimir Illich Lenin emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks, and particularly Lenin sought to adapt Marx’s ideas, developed with reference to events in Britain and Germany, to the far less economically developed context of Russia.

This goal presented some immediate theoretical and practical challenges. Marx viewed capitalism as historically necessary. First, the establishment of capitalism would generate unparalleled production capacity and wealth. It would do so by concentration of ownership and intense exploitation of the industrial working class, or proletariat. Concentrated in huge industrial centers these workers would realize they were the real producers of this wealth. As a result, they would overthrow their masters through a revolution that established communism. This did not happen in 19th century Britain or Germany, but Lenin saw another possibility: because foreign imperialists dominated Russia’s capitalism sector, it was especially repressive and not subject to some of the welfare state style reforms carried out in Britain and Germany. This made Russia vulnerable to overthrow. Once a revolution occurred in Russia, Lenin argued, it would spur a revolutionary wave that would sweep across Europe and liberate the working classes. The weakest link in the chain would begin the process of breaking it.

However, the Russian secret police were effective at keeping these groups under control and exiled Lenin to Siberia from 1895-1897. He lived in Europe prior to the uprising of 1905, and was forced into exile again in 1907. After the Tsar abdicated and the Provisional Government formed, Germany sought to force Russia out of the war by helping Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders return in 1917. In an atmosphere of growing chaos, worker councils, or Soviets, began taking control of industrial enterprises. Peasants began to seize estates. A master political organizer, Lenin seized on two slogans: “All power to the Soviets” and "Land, Peace, Bread.” To a war weary population, these slogans resonated powerfully and the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917. Almost immediately, the Bolsheviks negotiated the Brest-Litovsk peace accord with Germany, ending Russia’s participation in World War II. A civil war ensued between the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary forces, and the White Army of the Provisional Government authorities and reformers and monarchists. The White Army forces received support from outside powers but the Bolsheviks still prevailed by 1921 and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established on December 28, 1922.

What is to be done? Rebuilding the State

Having vanquished its foreign and internal enemies, the new government now had the challenge of establishing a communist state in a war ravaged, semi feudal country. The challenge is stated well in the title of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet: What is to be Done? In it, Lenin explained his view of the role of the Communist Party as a vanguard party. Lenin rejected liberal democracy as a form of government and representation because capitalist-oriented parties would inevitably use cooptation and control to maintain their power. The working class needed representation that could discern what was best for them, and act as a protector. Lenin called his solution "democratic centralism" and asserted that it represented the true interests of the masses. This is the essence of what is known as Marxism-Leninism : the marriage of Marx’s vision of a classless society free of private property and Lenin’s vision of the one-party state necessary to realize that vision. Other communist revolutions, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere would build on Lenin’s approach. Indeed, in many ways Lenin has had a far greater influence on the practices of Communist leaders than Marx.

Once in power, however, the Bolsheviks faced an array of problems. The Communists were not well established among the population at the time of the civil war and struggled to maintain power. Many of their most loyal worker cadres perished during the civil war and the leaders of the Soviet Union faced the challenge of consolidating political control and fostering industrialization among a population that knew little about them. The Party leaders confronted these challenges by institutionalizing Lenin’s conception of democratic centralism with the Communist Party in the role of vanguard. The structures of the Communist party and the state merged in increasingly tight ways. The party dissolved the constituent assembly and banned political parties in an attempt to centralize power. They restricted the role of trade unions to educate about the role of the party and passed rules that prevented party members from meeting in groups ahead of meetings. Gradually but firmly, the Party eliminated spaces for dissent and the growth of opposition with the party. In 1919, the Party Central Committee established the Secretariat and the Politburo as the dominant decision making bodies. When Lenin died in 1924, these processes deepened under the leadership of Josef Stalin; by 1929, voices of dissent or opposition to Stalin had been virtually eliminated. The secret police force, the GPU, played an increased role in monitoring and punishing any opposition.

What is to be done? Industrialization and the peasantry

The new government also faced immense economic challenges. As was previously indicated, the writings of Marx were not especially helpful. He had envisioned communism occurring after capitalism. Communist revolutions, according to Marx, started with capitalism in an urban society, not a rural one like Russia. Capitalism would produce wealth and communism would see that everyone benefited from it equally and without exploitation. So, how do revolutionaries establish communism in a society that had not really experienced capitalism in a sustained way? The many volumes of Marx’a writing contain no theory about how industrialization would occur under a communist political system. Capitalism, Marx assumed, had already done that. Lenin had hoped that a revolution in Russia would spark other socialist revolutions across Europe, but a worker uprising in Germany failed in 1918 and went no further. Crackdowns on leftist parties convinced Lenin that the Soviet Union was on its own. During the war, a very strict program of “war communism,” under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, gave the party complete control over the productive forces. The state forcibly requisitioned grain and other agricultural commodities. This served the purposes of war but left resentments in the countryside.

In an effort to address that problem, the Party opted for a moderation of communist economic structures in 1921. The New Economic Policy (NEP) required peasants to meet a production quota that went to the state; they could then do what they wished with the surplus. While this seemed to compromise communist principles by permitting a free market in agriculture and the accumulation of small levels of private wealth, party leaders viewed it as a way to build trust among the peasants in the party and its goals. The NEP did limit the ability of the state to use agriculture as a source of capital for industrialization. Critics of the policy, most notably Leon Trotsky, argued that the state should procure more of the production and sell it in international markets to finance industrialization. Peasants should be encouraged to join cooperatives and moved more quickly towards a fully communist economy. Prosperous producers should be taxed more heavily.

Throughout these debates, Stalin supported the NEP and criticized those who challenged it. He focused his efforts on consolidating personal control of the party, and thus the state itself, and used the opposition of Trotsky, his most significant political rival, and other party members, to the NEP as evidence of their disloyalty to the party. The party expelled Trotsky in 1927 and forced him into exile in 1928. Soviet agents murdered Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Once Stalin had eliminated Trotsky and consolidated his complete control over the party and the Soviet state, he reversed his position and abruptly ended the NEP in 1929.

Collectivization and Terror

With the end of the NEP in 1929, economic pragmatism gave way to the pursuit of complete control of the economy through a process of collectivization . The economic structures that emerged after 1929 were to remain in place until the late 1980s .These policies created a command economy in which the state makes all decisions about what will be produced, in what quantities, and at what price. Private property and free markets are not present. One of the official justifications for collectivization was to eliminate rural inequality and free the peasantry from the exploitation of better off peasants known as Kulaks. However, these policies confronted significant resistance from the peasants they were supposed to benefit. Fields and livestock were burned and slaughtered rather than be handed over to the state. Some regions of the Soviet Union experienced famine on a massive scale: between 3-4 million perished in Ukraine alone. Some scholars have estimated the overall deaths to exceed 10 million. Overall production levels declined, but what mattered to Stalin was that the state controlled virtually all of it. The country’s productive resources and its citizens were now under the complete control of the Soviet state and could be used to feed workers in the cities or purchase the components of industrialization through trade.

Stalin’s system is perhaps the most thorough example of a totalitarian regime. Every aspect of social, economic and political life was completely controlled. The state eliminated any space for independent thought or organization. Political participation was only possible through state and party established organizations. Failure to participate in at least some of these organizations became evidence of disloyalty. Secret police monitored every organization, work place, and family, even children were encouraged to report “anti-Soviet” or “anti-social” (it was the same thing) or behavior. Once Stalin had established control over the economy, he set out to eliminate any remaining vestiges of opposition or even the mildest questioning of orthodoxy. A series of “show trials” between 1936 and 1938 forced party members, including some of the original Bolsheviks, to confess to political sins they did not commit before they were executed. Leading central committee members and military officers that Stalin suspected of the slightest bit of disloyalty were detained, accused, and killed; tens of thousands of party members perished in these purges.

The Great Patriotic War

As the rise of the Third Reich created tensions throughout Europe, Stalin hoped to keep the USSR out of a European war. He signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty effectively carved up Poland into zones of German and Soviet control. Whether the old joke that “the only person Stalin ever trusted was Hitler” is true or not, this agreement did not work as Stalin hoped; Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Their initial blitzkrieg brought German forces close to victory in Moscow but then bogged down into long and bloody sieges that eventually brought retreat and defeat. However, even though Stalin’s Five Year Plans were wasteful and inefficient, industrialization had enabled the country to hold back the Nazis, though at a staggering human cost. While his purges were damaging to the quality of his officer corps, his call to the people to defend the homeland helped spur what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War. The entry of the United States into the war and the D-Day invasion at Normandy in June 1944 helped conclude this terrible war, the war on the Eastern Front was the most decisive turning point. German casualties exceeded 4 million; nearly 4 times the total on the Western front. The German army killed nearly 7 million Soviets while more than a million more died as prisoners of war. 3-4 million Soviet citizens died of starvation and other war related causes.

The memory of the war and the immense loss and suffering it caused has remained an indelible part of the political culture of the Soviet Union and Russia after 1991. It provided a stronger basis for the legitimacy of the Soviet state than any other accomplishment during its 70 years or existence. The ideology of Marxism and the Soviet versions of it that emerged under the leadership of the USSR presented communism as a force that transcended nationalism and other more limited forms of community. The nationalism of World War I was demounced as an ideological smoke screen, like religion in earlier ages, to prevent workers from realizing their true brotherhood. Yet, against the genocidal nationalism of the Nazis, it was the will to defend “Mother Russia” that provided the fundamental motivation that led to victory. The Soviet state found many ways to remind people of that over the next several decades.

The Cold War

As devastating as the war was for the Soviet Union, the country emerged from the war far more powerful globally. Europe was in ruin and the Soviet army occupied the eastern portion of Germany. It quickly became apparent that the wartime alliance had been a marriage of convenience as the two emergent superpowers disagreed on a wide range of issues from Central Europe to the Korean peninsula. Stalin quickly moved to challenge independent non-communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of Eastern Europe. A bipolar world order emerged in which two ideologically opposed foes fought for dominance. They avoided direct war, but battled each other on a variety of fronts and levels: the pursuit of nuclear weapons, espionage, and proxy wars from Vietnam to El Salvador.

In the years immediately after World War II, the Soviet state remained dominated by Stalin. His death in 1953 led to a leadership battle from which Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the most powerful. Khrushchev and other party leaders began a process of de-Stalinization . In a speech to the Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev criticized the “cult of personality” around Stalin and sought to reestablish control by the Communist Party by moving to revive The Central Committee and Politburo as decision-making bodies. The system did not become more democratic in terms of citizen participation but it became more stable and predictable. Collective decision making by the party leadership, rather than the whims of one individual, became the principal force shaping policy. This focus on organization, process, stability, and predictability characterized policy making in the Soviet Union until the 1980s. In doing so, the party reaffirmed the Leninist idea of the vanguard party. The secret police were brought back under state control as well and the use of wide spread terror and murder of dissidents ended. For a time in the late 1950s, Khrushchev permitted a bit wider range of cultural freedom.

The economic structures put in place by Stalin in the 1930s remain entrenched but Khrushchev put more emphasis on improving agricultural productivity. The production of consumer items also improved. By the early 1960s, Soviet life settled into a kind of new normal in which a gradually improving standard of living coexisted with strict controls on political activity as well as information. For many Soviet citizens, life was far easier than any other period in the 20th century. The basics—food, healthcare, education, housing—were available to most. The position of worker in this “workers' state” remained tightly under the control of the party. Absenteeism, drunkenness, pilferage, and black markets for valued products were rampant. A famous joke went, “you pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Central Committee removed Khrushchev from his position in 1964. This ended most of the small political and cultural openings of the past decade. Under the leadership of Leonid Breshnev, the party leadership focused further stability. Modest efforts to improve productivity never got far as the economic structures and remained under the control of a bureaucracy of party officials who used their positions to maintain their power. Political dissidents were no longer summarily executed, but placed under house arrest, subject to psychiatric detention, or incarcerated in a labor camp.

Throughout these years, the Soviet formula for legitimating its authority remained consistent. The defeat of Nazism in the Great Patriotic War remained a central theme and improved access to education and consumer goods and limited access to information about the outside world led many to see their conditions as an improvement. The Cold War ticked down a notch in the early 1970s as Soviet leaders negotiated arms control agreements with U.S president Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. By the end of the 1970s, these thaws in the Cold War gave way to new conflicts. Revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua overthrew US-backed leaders and led to charges that President Carter had “lost” the two countries to Soviet influence which helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. An uprising against a Soviet ally in Afghanistan in turn led to Soviet military intervention in December 1979. In Poland, workers organized an independent trade union, called Solidarity, which challenged the Soviet-backed leadership of the country, which was a member of the Warsaw Pact. The country’s aging leadership struggled to deal with these issues and the stress they put on the country’s struggling economy. Then, Soviet leader Brezhnev died in November 1982. His successor, Yuri Andropov re-introduced modest programs to increase worker productivity but he died after a year in office. His successor died after less than a year in office. In the leadership struggle that ensued, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the new leader of the country.

Glasnost, Perestroika and the End of the Soviet Union

Gorbachev represented a new generation of party leaders in the USSR. He was born in 1931, and joined the party in 1952. His predecessors had been survivors of the Stalin era and, like most of that generation, were conservative and risk-aversive. Gorbachev had a better education and had the opportunity to travel outside the country. While official state television told its citizens they lived better than West Germans, Gorbachev knew that was not true. He also realized that the US had indeed succeeded in turning the war in Afghanistan into the Soviet’s “Vietnam,” a bloody quagmire that was draining resources and losing support at home. He believed that improving the economy would require deeper levels of reform and would only be possible by relieving the pressures of the Cold War in ways that would enable him to cut back on military spending.

He introduced two policy initiatives toward these ends. Perestroika aimed to structure the economy in more productive directions while glasnost sought to open up the political system to critique and reform. While the economic reforms were not successful, the political reforms transformed the Soviet Union, providing an unprecedented level of freedom of speech. Gorbachev hoped this would generate constructive political movements that would strengthen the legitimacy of the system. Glasnost unleashed a torrent of public debate and in 1989, elections were held for the governors of the Soviet republics. Legislation introduced by Gorbachev ended the Party’s monopoly on political power, which had been a fundamental tenet of Leninism. These reforms made Gorbachev enormously popular in Europe and the United States as he negotiated arms control agreements with President Reagan and permitted non-communist governments to come to power in Poland and other Eastern European countries that had been Soviet allies. On November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and in 1991, East and West Germany reunited. Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize and became one of the most admired men in the United States and Europe.

In his home country, however, Gorbachev faced growing problems. Economic reforms mainly provided opportunities for party elites to take control of state companies that were privatized and deepened the control of black market mafias. The Soviet leader found himself between a rock and hard place. On one side, nationalist forces in the republics sought greater autonomy. In the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, annexed by Stalin during World War II, protest movements demanded independence. At the same time, party officials, long wary of his reform, concluded the process has gotten out of hand. On August 16, 1991, they placed Gorbachev under house arrest. Over the next four days, their efforts to regain control and end reform faced popular opposition and key members of the military were unwilling to use repression. The leaders were arrested and Gorbachev came back to Moscow on August 19.

Gorbachev’s position had been critically weakened, however. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, directly elected in 1990, met with the leader of the other republics. Over the next months, they negotiated a peaceful break-up of the USSR and on December 26, 1991 the Soviet Union ended after 70 years in existence. The Russian Republic emerged as one of 16 newly independent nations-states with Yeltsin as the President. Gorbachev was now president of a country that no longer existed. His policies transformed international relations but at home he was deeply unpopular and his political career was over.

How to explain the remarkable turn of events? Historians will debate this question for a long time, but we can start by remembering how the USSR came to be. A state in collapse after two and a half years fighting a far superior foe left an institutional and political vacuum. A party with limited popular base but clear ideas about what it wanted to do with political power took control. It imposed its power in very brutal fashion on a wary population. Other revolutions—in China, Iran, and Cuba, for example—came to power in part as mass movements. This provided leaders in those countries with a valuable reservoir of legitimacy. Machiavelli famously noted that a leader needed to be feared but it was also good to be loved. The leaders of the Soviet Union always had to rely far more on fear. When Gorbachev asked his fellow citizens to work with him to make the country better, the limited reservoir of legitimacy became visible. Many of his fellow citizens did not want to make communism better; they wanted something different.

Moreover, Gorbachev’s economic reforms did more harm than good for many Russians. Some commentators have criticized Gorbachev for trying to carry out economic and political reform at the same time. It would have been better, they argue, to do what Chinese Communist reformers did: focus on economic reform first. Yet, Chinese leaders were not facing the hostility of the United States as an impetus to maintain high levels of military spending. In order to pursue economic reform, Gorbachev needed to improve relations with the west and its human rights record became an important test of his sincerity. Chinese leaders faced no such pressure. Gorbachev also faced a much more massive challenge on the economic front. China’s command economy system was far less developed than in the USSR. Reforms in agriculture and state-owned enterprises could be carried out relatively easily and produced positive results quickly. In the Soviet Union, a deeply entrenched economic bureaucracy either sabotaged or coopted perestroika . This is another point at which the lack of underlying political legitimacy of the party undermined reform efforts.

The Russia Republic: Failed Democratization and Return to Authoritarian Rule

In the 1990s, a new Russian constitution created the elements of a democratic political system and competitive elections in 1996 led to the reelection of Boris Yeltsin. Almost immediately after the end of the USSR, Yeltsin’s economic advisors convinced him to carry out a rapid transition from a command to a market economy through a process that came to be called “shock therapy.” State policies privatized state-run businesses, devalued the Russian currency, and ended subsidies of many food staples and public services. Many workers were laid off. The standard of living for many declined and inequality grew between the winners and losers in this new market economy. A new class of economic “oligarchs” emerged and the capacity of the state declined, especially in areas such as public health, security, and fiscal administration. By the end of the decade, the Russian government underwent the humiliation of asking the IMF for assistance in dealing with its debt crisis. One of the two great superpowers of the Cold War era found itself seemingly reduced to the status of a “Third World” country.

President Yeltsin resigned in 1999 and appointed a little known former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, as his successor. Putin set out to reassert the power of the central government over regional authorities and the oligarchs. Putin believed that Russia’s democratization process in the 1990s weakened the state and sought to re-centralize power. Putin has reestablished the dominance of the central government in Moscow through constitutional changes that strengthen executive authority and limited the space for political opposition. Putin has repackaged an old formula: a unique Russian identity framed in opposition to the west and the liberal ideologies it represents, with nationalism replacing monarchy or communism. His foreign policy--including annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine, intervention in the civil war in Syria, and interference in foreign elections--have restored some of Russia’s global prominence. Nonetheless, its stature remains, as it was under the Tsars and the Communist party, rooted in military power that covers economic weakness.

Authors: Marc Belanger and Mary Coleman

• 4.1: Section 1-
• 4.2: Section 2-
• 4.3: Section 3-
• 4.4: Section 4-
• 4.5: Section 5-
• 4.6: Section 6-

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How Putin Controls Russia

By Isaac Chotiner

Last week, Vladimir Putin announced sweeping changes to the Russian constitution. Shortly afterward, the Prime Minister and his government resigned; there is no doubt that they did so at Putin’s behest. (On Monday, Putin formally submitted the constitutional changes and fired the country’s prosecutor general.)

Putin’s tenure as President is not supposed to extend beyond 2024, and the changes were widely seen as an attempt to extend his hold on power for as long as he deems fit. But, beyond that, no one really knows how he plans to reorganize the Russian state. To discuss Putin’s moves, I recently spoke by phone with Masha Lipman, a Moscow-based political analyst who has written extensively on Putin’s regime. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Putin’s decision-making style, how his personality and leadership have changed over the past two decades, and the differences between his rule and the later years of the Soviet Union.

Four years ago, you wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which you argued, in part, “The political environment in Russia is growing more chaotic. Putin may be the Russian tsar, but it is less clear to what extent he is in control.” Is it more clear how much he is in control today?

The issue of control is tricky. If one talks about whether government management is efficient in Russia, then no, it is not. And Putin has repeatedly, over his very long time in office, spoken about the need to increase the productivity of labor and quite a few other very important goals. I wouldn’t say he has delivered so well on those. But, if we define control as control over the élite, over making the decisions, of course Putin’s fully in control. And the developments of the past few days are very clear and persuasive evidence of him being in control of making decisions.

How do you understand his moves over the past few days?

This is a demonstration of how Putin is ultimately in charge and how he can make very important decisions by himself in an atmosphere of complete secrecy. We still do not know who was aware of what was in store for the country three or four days ago, and to what extent there is anyone who can actually challenge his decisions, even verbally.

Putin rarely consults with anyone, and, even if he does, it is done in a totally opaque way. He’s rarely explicit. Even if he consults with some people in his circle, people leave without having a clear idea of what his goal is and have to guess. Sometimes they guess right. Sometimes they guess wrong. Sometimes they try to curry favor and succeed, sometimes not. At the end of the day he is the ultimate decision-maker. And the strategy and the grand plans that he has for Russia, in their entirety, exist only in his mind.

You say he’s in a position of complete control. But he’s not Kim Jong Un . He doesn’t just say, “This is a diktat. I am President for life.” He seems to have some interest in going through what appear to be, but of course are not, democratic procedures. Is that just for public show? Is it to keep people within the Russian system, the élites, happy in some way? It often seems like he’s a dictator who doesn’t fully act the way people tend to think of dictators acting, if that makes sense.

Yes. I think there’s truth to that. He is way more sophisticated than to just say, “I rule by diktat and whatever I say is the law,” even if in practice it often is this way. He already was facing this dilemma back in 2008, when the constitution required that he step down after two consecutive terms as President. And he was so popular at the time—his approval rating was above eighty per cent. He could have changed the constitution easily and said, “I’m President for life,” which was something that his colleagues in some of the former Soviet republics had done before him. But he wanted to look more, I don’t know, European. He wanted to look more democratic. He wanted to maintain the appearance of being engaged in a procedural democracy. So he actually did step down but remained in charge. He figured out the configuration in which he anointed his very loyal colleague, Dmitry Medvedev, as President, and he himself took the office of the Prime Minister. So on the surface, on the formal levels, he did step down as the constitution requires. But he remained informally in charge, and “informally” means a great deal more sometimes in Russia than the formal institutions do. But he still kept the appearance of democratic legitimacy. And I think he cares about that.

Putin has been the leader of Russia for more than two decades now. Do you divide up that time into different eras, based on Russia’s place in the world or by the ways in which he chose to rule?

One way to look at it is that, when Putin first came to power, he inherited Russia in a state of misery and turmoil. And he undertook to consolidate power in the Kremlin by weakening all these formally defined institutions of power. He brought back stability and he was able to deliver prosperity because of the high and rising price of oil. At that point, he was certainly concerned a great deal about being fully in control, and he was able to reinstate that control for himself. However, he was also concerned about things such as a national development, economic growth. And he was able to balance his top priority of political monopoly with socioeconomic goals of national development and economic growth.

In 2011 and 2012, the economic growth slowed down. He could no longer deliver as generously as he had before. And, also in 2011 and 2012, he faced mass public protests. That was the first important turning point, when, actually having faced the challenge of mass protests, he tilted the balance quite strongly in favor of control and away from national development and economic growth. And this tilt became even stronger in 2014, when he made arguably the riskiest move in his whole career and annexed Crimea. This came at a cost, of course, of Western sanctions and a slowdown of the economy. And again he sacrificed those goals for the sake of control within and the concept of sovereignty abroad, which Putin thinks should be totally unbound. Nobody should be able to dictate to Russia what to do. Nobody should be able to bend its will and to bend its policy.

In 2001, you wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books in which you talked about Putin’s contempt for the idea of a free press and argued that Putin has “only one view of what is good or bad for Russia.” But you also wrote in this piece that Putin is not an “anti-liberal. He is not even an anti-Westernizer.” Do you think that that’s still true? Or do you think that Putin has fundamentally changed over the past two decades?

I think that’s changed. Putin was concerned about undesired Western influence on Russian domestic affairs. But he moved slowly and cautiously at the beginning. He did kick out the Peace Corps from Russia. He did kick out the Open Society Foundation from Russia. There were new regulations that encroached on non-governmental organizations that were funded by the West. However, in general, he was strongly interested in attracting investment to Russia. He just tried to balance the two. He wanted the benefits of lucrative coöperation with the West, but tried to limit the ability of the West to influence Russian domestic affairs. So, again, he was able to balance that up until the same turning points, first 2011 and 2012, and then 2014.

Was he anti-liberal? Well, as far as the economy was concerned, during his first term, and I would say his second term, no. Was he anti-Western? Partly so, but Russia still remained quite open. And, if we talk about the media, Putin moved very early in his first Presidential term to take the national television channels under his control. He did this with by far the largest media outlets with the largest audience, but he wouldn’t interfere with niche media or liberal media, allowing them to preach to the converted, and operate reasonably freely, to the extent that they did not stir unwanted passions among the broader public. Following the protests in 2011 and 2012, niche liberal media for the first time came under pressure. I would not say this was horrible pressure. People who worked there were not terribly harassed. But they were manipulated. There were a variety of ways Putin was acting, mostly through the owners of those media outlets rather than persecuting or prosecuting individual editors or journalists.

There was one more turning point. The Putin of 2013 or Putin of 2012, when he started his third term after a four-year break, when Dmitry Medvedev had been President, was a different leader from the one that he was at the beginning of his Presidential career, in the two-thousands.

Do you view that as him personally changing in some way? Or do you think the changes in the way he governs were more due to the different circumstances Russia faced?

It’s really hard for me to say. Anybody who’s been in power for twenty years changes. So think of the experience that he has gained over time. During the twenty years that he has been in power, Russia went through terrorist attacks, the war in Chechnya, natural calamities, technological catastrophes, mass protests, and he coped with all those. And, of course, he’s a different man. And I would say even somebody who does not approve of his policies cannot help marvelling at how he’s been in power for twenty years and enjoys an approval rating of about seventy per cent, and this without keeping his nation at large in fear.

Not wanting to keep the vast majority of people in fear would certainly be another thing that distinguishes him from many other strongmen.

Yeah, there’s certainly a difference. If we look, for instance, at the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , the way he treats the press is very well known. Turkey holds a very alarming record of keeping a lot of journalists in jail. This is not Russia’s case at all. There has been an emergence of new communication methods, of online communications of various sorts, and, of course, we have a lot of those in Russia. The media scene in Russia today has become even more vibrant. I’m talking about those media that are not the Kremlin’s voices. They are still engaged in investigative reporting and are working quite professionally. Working for these outlets is a bit risky, but the risk is not that the government will put you in jail. And actually, for anybody who’s interested, there’s a great deal to read on a daily basis in Russia of stuff that provides alternative information. And, by alternative, I mean alternative to the government point of view.

Obviously journalists have been killed in Russia, but do you think there’s a strategy behind the fact that Putin hasn’t gone the Erdoğan route of imprisoning them en masse?

Of course, sadly, journalists have been killed in Russia. But this is not the government’s policy. What happens in Russia, and unfortunately has happened quite a few times, is people with big clout—with big money, big power—settling scores with journalists whom they see as their adversaries. Putin is responsible for creating an atmosphere in the country in which such people can settle scores with their adversaries and get away with it. But it’s not that the government is after journalists. And there’s this huge difference in this respect between Turkey and Russia.

To the question of why that is, I think Putin is more sophisticated, and I think Putin’s regime is more sophisticated. And he prefers it to be that way. Many years ago, one of his trusted journalists reported that he said he wanted it to be so that there will be less freedom, but not much fear, either. Whether he indeed said that, because the journalist who reported this quote may have embellished it a little bit, I think that actually renders the gist of it.

Sadly, there’s been a great deal less freedom in Russia in the past few years and, recently, zero tolerance of his political opposition. The government has become more repressive. However, this has not turned Russia into a country where everyone lives in fear. I would say that, actually, compared to the Soviet period—and as a person of a certain age, I can compare it easily with the way it felt in the seventies and early eighties in Russia—I would say Russian people have a great deal more capacity for private pursuits of various sorts, as long as they are not political, in academics, in art, in literature. Politics, of course, is understood rather broadly in Russia. But I think there are more opportunities for consumption, for making money, for engaging in leisure, and favorite pastimes, etc. Foreign travel, of course, as well. So, in this sense, even critics of the regime would admit that the capacity for private pursuits remains fairly broad.

You mentioned that Putin’s approval rating is still around seventy per cent. In the West, we read about scattered protests, mostly in cities. How has the protest movement changed over the last couple of years as Putin has continued to entrench his role and his popularity?

I wouldn’t say the protest movement is not there. It is. And we had major protests in the past summer, in Moscow. That protest was strictly political, was public outrage about the egregious manipulation of the elections to the Moscow City Council. Because that protest was strictly political in nature, it was very brutally suppressed. Actually, the extent of brutality was unprecedented. And that in itself for a while fuelled the protesters even further. [At one protest , in July, 2019, police wielded nightsticks against protesters and arrested more than a thousand of them, including the opposition leader Alexey Navalny , who was sentenced to thirty days in prison.] However, the way it is in Russia—and I think this is what probably makes Russia different from some other countries where the regime is tough—the protests come in waves. And after the wave subsides, there is not much left there in terms of organization, in terms of an identification with a party, a movement, a leader. People rise and then they go back home and there is nothing for a long time.

On the other hand, socioeconomic protests have become fairly frequent and quite tenacious at times. The government is, I would say, much more tolerant toward a protest that has socioeconomic demands, and not infrequently they make some concessions so people won’t get enraged even further. These protests are not infrequent and are not limited to Moscow or St. Petersburg. There’s an ongoing protest, quite tenacious, in the Russian North, against the construction of a new landfill. People are really, really adamant on not allowing this new landfill to be built near their locality. But these protests are always limited to a locality and to a particular cause. Those protesting in one city would not reach out to other groups.

There’s reluctance to organize, as I mentioned earlier, around a political cause, a political leader, or form a political party or a movement. And this protest being limited to a particular cause or a locality is beneficial for the government. It is not true that the government doesn’t care what people feel or think. But the government certainly does not regard the people as a force to reckon with. A factor, yes, but not a force.

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The Russian Political System

Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance

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Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why? Research Paper

Introduction.

A political system is a combination of the formal and informal structures which manifest the state’s dominion over its geographical sphere of influence as well as its citizens. The political system of a state can change as the country adjusts to the realities it faces or as it tries to balance the needs of various competing interests within its borders.

Russia and China are two nations which have made significant changes in their political systems over the past two decades. In the Communist era, Russia was a totalitarian authoritarian state with the communist political party wielding all the power in the country.

This changed with the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia today is a practicing democracy multi party state and the population has partial freedom of access to information and people are allowed to engage in opposition activity (Dmitry 3). China is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which has been in power for over 60 years.

The party has a monopoly on power and the state intolerant to any one who questions the rights of the party to rule. Lawrence and Michael note that the CCP dominates state and society in China with the party exercising control over the military, political institutes, public institutions, the media and the judiciary (2).

Ideology plays a critical role in China’s political system and the CCP uses ideology to justify its permanent monopoly on power. The ideology of the party is articulated as “the party must uphold and improve the basic economic system, with public ownership playing a dominant role” (7).

This underlines the Leninist roots that the party has. This paper will argue that China’s political system is more successful than Russia’s based on an analysis of the social and economic outcomes of the two countries in the past two decades.

Russian political system

The social sectors of Russia have experienced some significant changes from 1991 to 2011. The education system of the country has witnessed growth and the state provides elementary education and the education for all its citizens and the country boasts of a very high literacy level with 99% of the population being able to read and write (CIA). The portion of the population which has attained higher education is high and growing even higher due to the investments made into education by the population.

Russia has experienced a significant increase in the portion of the population who has access to specialized and higher education (Roshchina 23). Population census carried out in 1989 indicated that only 45.2% of the population had special skills as a result of higher education and diplomas.

By 2002, 57.9% of Russians had professional education. However, the government’s contribution to the educational sphere is not impressive with education expenditure making up only 3.9% GDP of the country and advances in the educational sector have been fueled by initiatives by the community.

The health care sector of country has suffered considerably from 1991 due to reduction in government funding. In the Soviet Union era, health care was provided to all citizens and the government invested heavily in this sector. Following the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s health care system has become privatized and not every citizen has access to the services.

From 1991, Russia has been moving from its soviet styled centrally planned economy to a more capitalistic and market-based economy which has enabled the country to compete favorably on a global level. Owing to the collapse of the Soviet Union, privatization began to take place in the industry and agricultural sector and this rapid privatization led to increased private ownership.

For most of the years in the 1990s, Russia experienced hyperinflation and industrial collapse due to the economic liberalization which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union (Volkoy and Julia) Hyper-inflation had an adverse effect on the Russian public since it devalued their savings and therefore left many destitute (Mendelson and Gerber 4).

The government was also forced to reduce its social services due to the inflation which led to increased mortality rates and a decline in provision of health care (Galbraith and Ludmila 90).

However, the country managed to recover from this as the currency stabilized and poverty levels. Starting from 1998, Russia experienced financial recovery and the country has continued on this path with manageable inflation rates, decreasing levels of poverty and increased employment opportunities for Russians.

The level of people living below the poverty line currently stands at 13.1% which is a significant decrease from the 30% level recorded in the 1990s. Russia has a GDP of %1.791 trillion with the GDP per capita being $16,700. Between 2010 and 2011, the country’s GDP experienced a growth rate of 4.3% (CIA).

The poverty levels in Russia have reduced significantly in the past 20 years and analysis reveal that the purchasing power of Russians has increased by 45% since 1991 (Parfitt). However, there has been a phenomenal increase in the income disparity between the rich and the poor. This disparity is attributed to the turbulent post-Soviet period where the social elites acquired shares of once publicly held institutes for meager amounts of money.

Dmitry defines Russia as a “highly managed democracy” where all the institutes of a democracy exist but they do not have any real power (4). Even so, Russians have been enjoying increasing liberties due to the democratic system. From the 1990s, Russia has practiced a parliamentary democracy and more significantly, a liberalized press which has led to more freedom of speech for the citizens as the independent commercial press operates without government censor (Hahn and Igor 1350).

The system lacks an overarching ideology to justify its rule and it is not intolerant of those who question its right to rule and nor does it engage in terrorizing political opponents.

Chinese Political System

Significant changes have been observed in the social sectors of China in the past 20 years. China’s reforms led to a large increase in living standards throughout the country and food deprivation virtually disappeared (Zhu). The health outcomes of the population where also increased as health care services became available to more people in the 1990s.

The Chinese government has made substantial investments in the education of its population. These investments have paid off with the illiteracy levels reducing and the number of college educated Chinese increasing (Xiaohui and Hu 1).

The literacy rate in china was 92% in 2011 and the enrolment rate for higher education has grown from 1 million to 5.5 between 1997 and 2007. This increase in education provision is credited to the government which has invested massively in the education of the population.

Before the 1990s, the Chinese government offered job guarantees, pensions, housing, and healthcare for its urban population and poverty among this group was absent. However, restructuring in the 1990s which was aimed at making the economy more market based led to layoffs and lack of social security guarantees for many workers which increased poverty levels (Park and Wang 396).

The Chinese system is characterized by centralized planning agencies and the single legal party. The monumental economic growths that the country has witnessed in the past 2 decades have made China to be recognized as the most important developing country. Up to the late 1970s, china adopted a closed door policy and trade with the rest of the world was minimal. However, the leaders of the CCP observed that the prosperity of the country could only be achieved if economic reforms were adopted and an open door policy followed.

The acceleration of economic reforms in the People’s Republic of China during the 1990s resulted in economic liberalization which occurred in an orderly manner due to the rigid central management by the CCP. This market-oriented economy has been followed from 1991 up to 2011 and it has led to great economic development for the country (Zhu).

The socialist market economy adopted by China through the 1990s and 2000s has led to rapid advances in China’s economy as agricultural productively grew and coastal cities were opened to foreign investment. The entry by China to the WTO increased foreign investments in the country as more companies shifted their production to China.

China’s entry into the WTO enhanced the country’s attractiveness as a manufacturing base since companies were assured that they would operate under international laws and standards which China was now bound by (Ruisheng 215). As of 2011, China had a GDP of $6.989 trillion while the GDP per capita stood at $8,400.

Studies indicate that urban-rural inequality in China declined substantially due to the exposure to international trade which encouraged income distributions as investments were made in rural areas (Galbraith and Ludmila 88).

In an attempt to fight the rural poverty which had been inherent in China before the 1990s, the government has established large-scale poverty investment programs that direct resources to poor regions in the country. Due to this efforts, official Chinese poverty statistics reveal that poverty levels have experienced a dramatic reduction from 30% in the late 1980s to 3% in 2000 (Park and Wang 397).

The Chinese political system is structured around communism which by definition is a system in which “the right to private or family property is abolished by law, mutual consent, or vow” (Woolsey 1). While it is still a one party state, there have been some reforms in the system in the past 20 years and the party has a lot of support from the country’s citizens (Lei).

Even so, the Chinese Communist Party wishes to maintain control over its population and an independent press are yet to be realized in China. The state maintains strong control of the information that the citizens have access to and any anti-state sentiments cannot be expressed by a citizen without government reprisal. Open dissent against the Chinese political system is met with harsh measures by the state but even so, some political changes have occurred within the local level.

The Chinese political system has fostered widespread corruption since the party enforces its own investigations when its members are accused of wrongdoing and the judicial authorities are unable to investigate party officials without the party’s consent. Due to this power wielded by the party and its officials, bribes for permits and the embezzlement of state funds is rampant.

Both Russia and China have been able to achieve significant socio-economic advances in the past two decades. Economic liberalization in the 1990s led to an overall economic well being for both Russia and China. The two countries were able to exploit their market power to advance their respective economies with great success.

While the GDP per capita for both China and Russia have increased over the past twenty years of economic changes, China has experienced the more significant increase with GDP per capita increasing by approximately 4 times.

As it currently stands, China has been able to achieve high rates of economic growth in spite of, or even arguably because of the absence of democracy. However, the admirable growth by the Chinese economy may not be sustainable if tensions continue to build among discontent citizens and bring about the destabilization of the political system.

In Russia, the public lacks the ability to change the system which leads to a build up of anti-government sentiments among the population. Dmitry warns that this attitude may result in future reprisal against the leadership by the population therefore bringing down the entire system of highly managed democracy (5).

Even so, income inequality rose in both Russia and China from the 1990s as economic liberalization occurred. While both china and Russia have been experiencing income inequalities in the past 20years as the two nations shifted to market based economies, the situation is worse in Russia due to lack of a government control.

Due to their varied political system, the public’s reactions to this income disparities has been different with the poor in China expressing discontent in a mild manner because of fear of repression while those in Russia have use the democratic avenues to try and resolve the issues.

Due to the huge state control still enjoyed by the Chinese government, capital can be diverted to areas of social interest such as health, education, and welfare. China has aggressively protected its health care and education sectors even as the country has adopted a more market based economy (Xiaohui and Hu 1). This is in contrast to Russia where these sectors have suffered major losses of position due to the economic transition since the fall of the Soviet Union.

This paper set out to argue that China’s political system is more successful than Russia’s system. The paper has notes that both Russia and China experience rising inequalities which are the result of transitioning from a communist to a capitalist economic system.

The significant government control in China has given it an advantage since capital has been diverted to areas of social interest such as education and health care. The paper has also noted that China continues to suffer from poor human right conditions. While Russia has made significant advances in its political sphere with Russians today living under a multi-party system with many political liberties, the country’s political system is still rivaled by the one-party system in China.

In overall, the paper has demonstrated that China’s political system has yielded more benefits for its citizens that the Russian system has done for its people. It can therefore be declared that China’s political system is more successful than Russia’s.

Works Cited

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The World Factbook: Russia. 2012. Web.

Dmitry, Gorenburg. “The Nature of the Russian Political System”. Russian Politics and Law , 49.2 (2011): 3–6. Print.

Galbraith, James and Ludmila Krytynskaia. “The Experience of Rising Inequality in Russia and China during the Transition”. The European Journal of Comparative Economics, 1.1 (2004): 87-106. Print.

Hahn, Jeffrey and Igor Logvinenko. “Generational Differences in Russian Attitudes towards Democracy and the Economy”. Europe-Asia Studies , 60.8 (2008): 1345–1369. Print.

Lawrence, Susan and Michael Martin. Understanding China’s Political System . Washington, Congressional Research Service, 2012. Print

Lei, Zhao More than 80 million are Party members. 2011. Web.

Mendelson, Stern and Gerber Troy. “Failing the Stalin Test”. Foreign Affairs , 85.1 (2006): 2–9. Print.

Parfitt, Tom. Russia’s rich double their wealth, but poor were better off in 1990s . 2011. Web.

Park, Albert and Wang, Sangui. “China’s Poverty Statistics”. China Economic Review , 12.1 (2001): 384-398. Print.

Roshchina, Yana. Accessibility of professional education in Russia. Berlin: ESCIRRU, 2010. Print.

Ruisheng, Cheng. “Reflections from China.” Journal of International Affairs 62, no. 2 (2011): 213-219. Print.

Volkoy, Vladimir and Julia Denenberg. Wealth and poverty in modern Russia. 2005. Web.

Woolsey, Dwight. Communism and Socialism in Their History and Theory: A Sketch . NY: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009. Print.

Xiaohui, Wang and Hu Wenbin. China Development Brief . 2006. Web.

Zhu, Jin. China to raise its poverty line . 2010. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 27). Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why? https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-the-russian-political-system-with-china-and-state-which-is-more-successful-and-why/

"Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why?" IvyPanda , 27 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/compare-the-russian-political-system-with-china-and-state-which-is-more-successful-and-why/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why'. 27 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why?" October 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-the-russian-political-system-with-china-and-state-which-is-more-successful-and-why/.

1. IvyPanda . "Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why?" October 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-the-russian-political-system-with-china-and-state-which-is-more-successful-and-why/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Compare the Russian Political system with China and state which is more successful and why?" October 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-the-russian-political-system-with-china-and-state-which-is-more-successful-and-why/.

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What to Read to Understand Russia

Anastasia Edel, a Russian-born American social historian, recommends books about the country as the war in Ukraine continues.

Welcome to the Books Briefing , our weekly guide to The Atlantic ’s books coverage. Join us Friday mornings for reading recommendations.

A century and a half after they were writing, authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature. But in an essay we published this week, Anastasia Edel, the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution, and the New Tsar , argues that the rarified society those 19th-century writers depicted offers little help in understanding the brutal war currently being waged in Ukraine. Instead, Edel suggests that readers who want to comprehend Putin’s Russia look to Chevengur , an epic account of the Russian Revolution, written in 1929 by the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and wasn’t widely available there until the late 1980s: Stalin thought it depicted the revolution as unduly savage.

Platonov’s work remained largely unread for much of the rest of the 20th century; though Edel grew up in Russia, she didn’t encounter Chevengur until she moved to the U.S. in the ’90s. The novel, available this month in a new English translation, is long, dense, and strange. But Edel argues that it offers unparalleled insight into the way that dangerous and misguided ideas can stoke violence and warp a nation. As Edel writes, “the ease with which Putin’s Russia accepts and perpetuates brutality ceases to confound once one has witnessed Platonov’s rendering of a country that seems to run on violence.” This week, I emailed Edel and asked her to recommend a few more titles. Our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic ’s Books section:

• Seven books that earn your tears
• What an Israeli novelist knows about overcoming trauma
• “Districts,” a poem by Noah Warren
• Ben Rhodes on Hisham Matar and the pain of exile

Maya Chung: For readers who are looking for other novels that might illuminate something about Russian culture, society, or history—especially those that might help them better understand the war in Ukraine —what would you recommend?

Anastasia Edel: The trouble with Russian cultural advice today is that after nearly two years of this atrocious war, many of the novels I once couldn’t live without now seem tainted, false. Luckily, Russia’s body of literature is vast, with plenty of books for the new moment. One of my favorites is Moscow to the End of the Line , by Venedikt Erofeev. Written between 1969 and 1970 and passed around in tamizdat [banned works that were published outside the Soviet Union and then smuggled back in] until 1989, this postmodernist long poem is dark and hilarious. The plot is simple: A lyrical hero is traveling to his beloved on a local train while drinking himself to death and talking to God, angels, and fellow passengers. It’s a treasure.

Then there’s Evgeny Shvarts’s 1944 fabulist play, The Dragon . Though it was known in the U.S.S.R. as “antifascist,” The Dragon is, in fact, a pretty accurate diagnosis of Russian authoritarianism. In the play, a wandering knight named Lancelot challenges the dragon terrorizing an unnamed kingdom. The play’s 1988 TV adaptation was wildly popular in the U.S.S.R. ( it’s available on YouTube with English subtitles ).

Another illuminating book is Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog : a superb satirical novella that describes the mentality of the “victorious proletariat,” whose heirs are ruling Russia today. It is dystopian, witty, and, like most of Bulgakov’s works, very readable.

Among the Western works written about Russia, I enjoyed The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes’s take on the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. My family knew Shostakovich (I wrote about it for The New York Review of Books ), and I can attest that Barnes masterfully captured the great artist’s torment during Stalin’s Great Terror, the same terror that ruled the lives of millions.

Chung: What about nonfiction titles? Are there any books about modern Russian politics, or even Putin, specifically, that you’ve found particularly useful?

Edel: I would recommend Anna Politkovskaya’s 2004 book, Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy , which is excellent, brave, and deeply sad given that Anna was assassinated in 2007 .

Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine is a great book that situates Russia’s current war in the historical context, specifically in Ukraine’s centuries-long struggle for independence and an identity that is separate from Russia.  Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014) delves into Putin’s television empire and captures the realities of a country still oscillating between the freedom of the 1990s and Putin’s swelling authoritarianism.

Chung: Though Platonov’s novel can tell us a lot about what we’re seeing in Russia today, it was written almost 100 years ago. Are there any more contemporary titles, either fiction or nonfiction, that come to mind—especially those that, like Chevengur , read as satirical critiques of Russian society?

Edel: In addition to Moscow to the End of the Line , with its many gems of Russian humor, try Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra (1992). Pelevin is a master of the absurd with a knack for grounding the reader in superbly rendered everyday details, which makes for an intense, unsettling read.

Chung: In your story, you mention that writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky feel less relevant to the moment. What—if anything—do you feel like we can still learn from those sorts of authors? Are there any 19th-century novels you hold particularly dear?

Edel: For me, Anton Chekhov’s short stories like “ Misery ,” “ The Student ,” “ Ward No. 6 ” still stand. They reflect Russian existential reality and yet are filled with the light of Chekhov’s genius. Whether misery is a good soil for cultivating beauty is a different question.

Or Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat , a novella about Russia’s subjugation of the Caucuses in the 19th century. The novel’s protagonist, a fierce local warrior leader, defects to the Russians to save his family. Here Tolstoy’s superb writing is unencumbered by plot or character contortions. It is an honest and thus deeply disturbing work (Tolstoy himself fought on the Russian side in the Caucasian War), published only after his death.

Finally, Astolphe de Custine’s brilliant and prophetic Letters From Russia . A French aristocrat whose family was persecuted during the French Revolution, de Custine wrote his account of traveling to Russia in 1839, during the reign of Nicholas I (who hated the book). The letters peer deeply into the Russian mind and power dynamics. They also zero in on the idea of conquest as Russia’s “secret aspiration” and describe Russians as “a nation of mutes.” Nearly two centuries later, the assessment remains true.

A Vision of Russia as a Country That Runs on Violence

What to Read

Midlife: A Philosophical Guide , by Kieran Setiya

“The trials of middle age have been neglected by philosophers,” writes Setiya, an MIT professor who found himself in the throes of a midlife crisis despite a stable marriage, career, and his relative youth (he was 35). His investigation of the experience, Midlife , is “a work of applied philosophy” that looks a lot like a self-help book. Setiya examines pivotal episodes from the lives of famous thinkers—John Stuart Mill’s nervous breakdown at 20; Virginia Woolf’s ambivalence in her 40s over not having children; Simone de Beauvoir’s sense, at 55, that she had been “swindled”—and extracts concrete lessons. Feeling restless and unfulfilled by a sense of repetition in your life? Setiya advises finding meaning not in telic activities, tasks that can be completed, but in atelic activities such as listening to music, spending time with loved ones, and even thinking about philosophy. Still, not every problem yields a solution: Setiya offers up several strategies for coming to terms with one’s own death and then ruefully admits, “There is no refuting this despair.” But this resigned honesty is part of the book’s charm. You may not end up radically changing what you do on a daily basis, but Midlife will help you recast your regrets and longing for the possibilities of youth into a more affirming vision for the rest of your life.  — Chelsea Leu

From our list: What to read if you want to reinvent yourself

Out Next Week

📚 Beautyland , by Marie-Helene Bertino

📚 John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community , by Raymond Arsenault

📚 One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America , by Benjamin C. Waterhouse

Your Weekend Read

The Multiplying ‘Philip Roths’

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Russia’s 2024 Presidential Vote: What to Know

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By Neil MacFarquhar

Why does this vote matter?

Does putin face any serious challengers, will the kremlin manipulate the results, can russians protest, can putin remain president for life.

When will the results be known?

Where can I find more information?

The presidential vote in Russia, which began Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum.

President Vladimir V. Putin, 71, will undoubtedly win a fifth term, with none of the three other candidates who are permitted on the ballot presenting a real challenge. The main opposition figure who worked to spoil the vote, Aleksei A. Navalny , a harsh critic of Mr. Putin and the Ukraine war, died in an Arctic prison last month.

Still, the vote is significant for Mr. Putin as a way to cement his legitimacy and refurbish his preferred image as the embodiment of security and stability. That image was tarnished when the war, advertised as a speedy operation to topple the government in Kyiv, turned into a slog that caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, ruptured relations with the West and ushered in harsher domestic repression.

“The Kremlin needs to demonstrate huge popular support, and that this support has increased since the beginning of the war,” said Nikolay Petrov, a Russian political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

The Kremlin habitually ensures that Mr. Putin faces no real competition. The other candidates — all members of the State Duma, Russia’s rubber-stamp Parliament — voted for the war in Ukraine, for increased censorship and for laws curbing gay rights.

Nikolai Kharitonov, 75, of the Communist Party, already lost badly to Mr. Putin in 2004.

Leonid Slutsky, 56 of the Liberal Democratic Party, a nationalist group loyal to Mr. Putin, has said he will not rally voters against the president.

Vladislav A. Davankov, 40, from the New People Party, is nominally liberal and has called for “peace” in Ukraine but has basically supported Mr. Putin.

Two candidates opposed to the war were disqualified. A veteran politician, Boris Nadezhdin , alarmed the Putin administration when tens of thousands of people across Russia lined up to sign petitions required for him to run. The Kremlin invalidated enough signatures to bar him.

Russia held real elections for about a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Ever since, the Kremlin has relied on various social, geographic and technical levers to ensure that its candidate receives an overwhelming majority.

Although Mr. Putin enjoys some support, the Kremlin has long sought to proclaim that he received more than 50 percent support in balloting, and also more support than he did in each previous vote. This year that means outstripping the 56 million votes that the authorities said he received in 2018; pundits are betting on 60 million.

Two important changes this time could add to the vote’s opacity.

For one, balloting will be held in the so-called “new territories,” the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed without fully controlling them. Russia’s election officials say the area has 4.5 million voters, an assertion virtually impossible to monitor amid a war.

“We cannot check the figures there and the authorities will use them as they wish,” said Alexander V. Kynev, an independent election expert in Moscow.

Also, the ability to vote online will be more widely available, with electronic voters in 29 regions on one huge list, with no means to check where or how they voted, Mr. Kynev noted.

In a sprawling, diverse country like Russia, the Kremlin can also use more traditional means. Regions dominated by ethnic strongmen, like the Caucasus, habitually report huge turnouts with Mr. Putin receiving 99 percent of the vote — even if relatively few people show up at polling stations.

Areas where state industries prevail also tend to report heavy support for the president. To turn out the vote, some polling stations hold raffles for prizes like household appliances or firewood. One Siberian region is offering 16,000 prizes.

But the Kremlin must rely on some votes in big cities, and that can get tricky. Excessive manipulation has created unrest previously. There might be slightly more manipulation this year because monitors are barred unless issued credentials by the candidates.

With street demonstrations banned, some Putin opponents hope to cast protest votes. The simplest method to lower his tally is to vote for someone else, experts noted.

“Noon Against Putin,” a campaign pushed by Mr. Navalny’s organization, suggests swarming polling places at midday on Sunday. But there are a number of hurdles, including possible confrontations with the police.

Also, in previous votes, few polling stations had more than 3,000 registered voters and many had fewer than 1,000. “It is technically very complicated to create a crowd,” said David Kankiia, an analyst with the Golos election watchdog, barred in Russia.

Since he was first appointed successor to President Boris Yeltsin in 2000, Mr. Putin has said Russia’s Constitution would dictate the length of his tenure. Then he kept rewriting the Constitution.

Asked in 2014 whether he would remain president forever, Mr. Putin responded , “This is not good and it is detrimental for the country and I do not need it either,” before adding, “We will see what the situation will be like, but in any case the term of my work is restricted by the Constitution.”

In 2008, when term limits forced him to step aside, he became prime minister under President Dmitri A. Medvedev, although Mr. Putin remained the power behind the throne until reclaiming the top job in 2012.

Presidential terms were extended to six years before the 2018 vote, and then in 2020 Mr. Putin changed the constitution again to reset his term clock. At this point, he can have at least two terms until 2036. If Mr. Putin lasts, he will soon outstrip the record, 29-year rule of Joseph Stalin.

When will the voting results be known?

The tally is expected to be announced sometime Sunday night Moscow time.

Putin, in Pre-Election Messaging, Is Less Strident on Nuclear War

A Collective ‘No’: Anti-Putin Russians Embrace an Unlikely Challenger

Russia Bars Antiwar Candidate in Election Putin Is All But Sure of Winning

Milana Mazaeva , Alina Lobzina and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency. It was 2012, not 2014.

How we handle corrections

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States. More about Neil MacFarquhar