When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, many observers assumed that Russia would follow a familiar path: from a one-party state to a market democracy, from a planned economy to a free one, and from an empire to a normal nation-state. The first decade after the collapse seemed to confirm the scale of the change and the depth of the difficulty. Prices were freed, state property was privatised, savings were wiped out, and millions of people experienced a fall in living standards that was, for many families, worse than anything they had known in peacetime. Yet by the end of the 1990s, Russia had not become the liberal democracy many reformers had hoped for, and the arrival of Vladimir Putin as president in 2000 marked a different settlement: order and stability, restored in part by the very institutions the Soviet Union had left behind.
The 1990s: Shock, Hope and Disillusion
To understand Putin’s Russia, it is necessary to understand the decade that came before it. Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, the government pursued rapid economic reform, freeing prices in 1992 and privatising large parts of state industry in the years that followed. The reforms were intended to create a market economy quickly, before opponents could reverse them, but they produced enormous hardship. Inflation destroyed savings, wages went unpaid for months, and a small number of well-connected businessmen, who became known as the oligarchs, acquired control of some of the country’s most valuable assets, including oil, gas, metals and media outlets. The privatisation of the 1990s remains one of the most resented episodes in modern Russian history.
The 1990s were also a decade of political turmoil. In 1993, after a confrontation between the president and the parliament, Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the parliament building in Moscow, and the new constitution that followed concentrated power in the presidency. In 1994, Russia went to war in Chechnya, in an attempt to prevent the republic from seceding, and the war, which lasted until 1996, was brutal, costly and deeply unpopular. By the end of the decade, Yeltsin was in poor health, his government was widely seen as corrupt, and many Russians associated democracy itself with disorder, poverty and humiliation. It was in that atmosphere, in the final days of 1999, that Yeltsin resigned and handed power to Vladimir Putin.
Putin’s Rise and the Siloviki
Putin came to power with a background that told its own story. He had served in the KGB, the Soviet security service, working in East Germany in the 1980s, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union he had worked in the administration of St Petersburg before moving to Moscow. He presented himself as a man of order, a patriot who would restore the authority of the state and defend Russia’s interests abroad. The second war in Chechnya, which began in 1999, provided the backdrop for his rise, and his tough language about the conflict won him support among Russians tired of the disorder of the 1990s. He was elected president in March 2000, and he would go on to dominate Russian politics for a generation.
One of the most important features of Putin’s rule was the growing influence of the siloviki, a term used to describe people from the security services, the armed forces and the law-enforcement agencies. Under Yeltsin, power had been shared, uneasily, between reformers, oligarchs, regional leaders and the security services. Under Putin, the balance shifted decisively towards the men from the security structures, who were appointed to senior positions in government, in state-owned companies and in the regions. They brought with them a way of seeing the world in which loyalty matters more than open debate and in which the interests of the country are best defended by a strong, centralised authority.
Energy, the State and the Oligarchs
The economic foundation of Putin’s Russia was energy. Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and natural gas, and the rise in world energy prices in the 2000s transformed the country’s finances. The government paid off foreign debts, built up reserves, raised pensions and wages, and funded a large programme of public spending. Yet the boom also reinforced the country’s dependence on oil and gas, and it gave the state a source of revenue that made it less dependent on taxation and less accountable to its citizens.
The relationship with the oligarchs was also renegotiated. In the early 2000s Putin made it clear that wealthy businessmen could keep their wealth, but only if they stayed out of politics. The arrest in 2003 of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company, sent an unmistakable message. Khodorkovsky was convicted of tax evasion and fraud, and Yukos was broken up, its assets absorbed largely by the state oil company Rosneft. Other oligarchs took the hint, and the result was a new arrangement in which private wealth existed alongside a state willing to use the law, the courts and the security services to discipline those who challenged it.
Media, Elections and the Management of Politics
The control of information was central to the new system. In the 1990s, Russian television had been lively, critical and often chaotic, with independent channels such as NTV offering reporting that embarrassed the government. In the early 2000s, the major television channels were brought under state control or under the control of companies loyal to the state. The press remained more varied, and the internet, in its early years, offered a space for criticism, but the dominant source of news for most Russians became state television, which presented a consistent narrative about Russia’s recovery and the dangers of opposition at home.
What the Video Contributes, and the Legacy
The documentary at the centre of this chapter takes viewers inside Putin’s Russia as it appeared to foreign observers in the years after his rise. It travels through Moscow and beyond, meeting ordinary Russians, journalists, opposition figures and officials, and it asks a question Western audiences have asked ever since: how does a country that was supposed to be becoming a democracy end up with a leader who has stayed in power for more than two decades? The film captures the contradictions of the period: a country more open and more prosperous than the Soviet Union had been, and yet more controlled, in its politics and its media, than the Russia of the early 1990s.
What is clear is that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not produce the outcome many expected. The institutions of the old system, above all the security services, survived the transition and adapted to the new conditions. The energy wealth that might have funded a more diverse economy instead reinforced the power of the state. The elections that were supposed to give Russians a choice became, in practice, a way of confirming the choices already made. The lesson is not that Russia is doomed to repeat its past. It is that the habits and institutions of the past are difficult to escape, and that the transition from an authoritarian system to a free one requires the building of new institutions and new expectations, work that, in Russia, remains unfinished.