Explaining the resurgence
It will be very easy for future historians to look back on modern Russia and determine that the road to its authoritarian resurgence was inevitable. That all the signs were there from its very inception. The now-obvious parallels with the Weimar Republic make the case all the clearer. In the now familiar parallel, a defeated empire is weakened and down on its knees, beset with an economic crisis and a break up of its former territory. A narrative then emerges that it was betrayed, stabbed in the back by weak internal elements, and needs to use territorial conquest to reclaim its natural global position.
Historians can note for instance that from its outset the Russian federation was a deeply flawed creation. The origins of autocracy could be seen even in the 1993 constitutional amendment created by Boris Yeltsin, which allowed him to choose his own Prime Minister and pass laws without going through the Duma (parliament). This amendment was the result of Russia’s rapid privatisation which had tanked Yeltsin’s popularity and led to his impeachment. After Yeltsin resisted, armed militias fought in the streets in October 1993 until tanks rolled into Moscow and fired on the White House with lawmakers still inside, leaving Yeltsin as the military head of a neutered parliament. In retrospect, it seems that Russian democracy was wiped out along with it, effectively strangled in the crib.
This analysis, however, overlooks the way that Putin and his entourage behaved through his first 2 terms in office, as he started out a very different figure from the Neo-Slavic patriarch he would later become. He suggested for instance that Russia itself join NATO in 2000 after his election, believing that it would “strengthen Russia”. He also befriended Tony Blaire speaking endlessly of “financial cooperation.”. The Russian president even supported the US intervention in Afghanistan, and – while he was critical of the Iraq invasion — said in 2008 that Sadam Hussein was “rightly hanged for mass murder." He also had very little to say about NATO expansion in 2004 which he now parades as the West's greatest sin.
The single greatest turning point in the Russian kleptocracy’s view of western rapprochement seems to have been the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the subsequent protests in Tajikistan, Georgia and other countries. Putin and much of the government looked at those protests and concluded that these were foreign-funded plots to destroy Russia. Throughout the accounts of Putin's legacy his fears became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the more he lashed out at neighbouring countries like Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland, the more the West became convinced that he was their enemy, and so sanctions ramped up.
This begs the question of why Putin saw every protest in neighbouring countries, and move towards democracy, as a personal threat, and not a legitimate part of political discourse. What most of the protests were about of course was corruption and lack of fairness in the political process. The Ukrainian uprisings in 2004 and 2014 were about Russian meddling in the election, and later violence on behalf of the police. Something Putin saw no problem with. He praised the response of the Uzbekistani government in 2005 when it open-fired on peaceful protestors, and pledged to destroy the prime Minister of Georgia for siding with the demonstrators in his country.
The answer in part — according to Kremlin insiders — is that Russia itself was so corrupt and rife with infighting that Putin believed every other country was the same. They were only ever pretending to be democratic and law-abiding.
The Rubicon was probably crossed when the president decided to invade Georgia and annexe part of its territory. The rest of Putin's career was a downward spiral from this moment on as he amassed ever greater power for himself, and his subordinates became very good at only telling him things he wanted to hear. So any sign of Western intelligence activity no matter how benign was taken as proof that elections in Eastern Europe were being controlled by the West.
In 2020 Putin reportedly took to reading the works of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi’s leading intellectual and legal theorist, who proposed that dictatorship was really just a means of acting efficiently compared to the slower and inefficient legal processes of democracies. He draws on a long tradition of illiberal thought that sees the strong man as the answer to the power wielded by corrupt elites and misled masses.
Other parallels with Fascism since the Ukraine invasion of 2022 are almost too obvious. The Russians have taken to making fist salutes in front of a black Z symbol, first painted on their vehicles to indicate their direction zapad (west). They have also opened internment camps for kidnapped Ukrainian citizens, and have completely banned all criticism of the government.
While this makes it incredibly tempting to describe modern Russia as Fascist, words still have technical meanings. Fascism was a historical movement from 1920s Italy that advocated no separation between the government and everyday life, it was overtly totalitarian. Using the word as a point of pride. The Nazi variant of it introduced eugenics with forced sterilisation and mass internment (and later execution). It also sought to acquire territory specifically to fund its economy through forced labour. Modern Russia has the symbols, the militarism, and the censorship, but none of the underlying ideology. If anything it feels like a cheap and tacked-on version of Fascism, which the Ukrainians prefer calling “Rashism.”
The differences between Hitler’s Fascism and Putin’s Rashism become clearer if one pays attention to what the two actually said in their speeches.
Hitler in Mein Kampf for example discounts democracy explicitly;
"...people with a great past from the time when they surrender themselves to the unlimited, democratic rule of the masses slowly lose their former position; for the outstanding achievements of individuals...are now rendered practically ineffective through the oppression of mere numbers.."
Putin by contrast, outwardly claims to be a democrat and believes that the strengthening of the Russian state is part of the people’s expression of democracy. What he is sternly against is Liberalism, something he has made abundantly clear in the last few years.
“The liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done . . . Every crime must have its punishment . . . So, the liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
While similar, the two doctrines are not quite the same. Democracy is the reflection of the will of the people, while liberalism aims to protect individual freedoms by not transgressing on them. It is this difference that explains much of the autocratic resurgence in Russia and the 21st-century world.
The Rubicon
In contrast to Hitler, Putin lacks a Reichstag fire or night of the long knives where he was able to concentrate his power and completely crush the opposition overnight, but there were many gradual steps to his consolidation that took place through subtle legal reform. Any explanation of why autocracy returned to Russia has to explain how and why this happened.
The why question, is somewhat complicated. The chaotic 1990s in Russia was a terrible economic period followed by a decade of prosperity in the 2000s known as the ‘fat decade’ that Putin presided over. He used those years to make hay out of his popularity and rebuild Russia's image. The 2010s by contrast were a period of slow economic growth and rising authoritarianism worldwide. The 2008 financial crisis not only made Russia's business sector less dynamic, but it also convinced Putin of the weakness of the west and its allies. Even while democratic movements continued to spread to Ukraine, the Kremlin saw fewer opportunity costs to stamp these out. The final straw seemed to be the election of Zelensky who was openly pro-Western and advocated for a uniquely Ukrainian national identity. Interestingly despite Putin's later claims about NATO his essay penned in 2021 about Ukraine's Russian future barely mentions it. Dedicating only a dozen words out of 3000 to the organisation. Most of his writing is spent denouncing Ukraine's attempts to build an “artificial identity” separate from Russia. This, therefore, explains the timing.
The question of where is also quite interesting. After all, why Russia? Why not Poland, Korea, or Brazil? This is all the more interesting when examining other former Soviet states that democratized in the last few decades. In eastern Europe, with the exception of Belarus, post-Soviet democratization was an incredible success, with standards of living more than doubling in nearly every case. Orlando Figes in his book The Story of Russia (2022) highlights the ‘lustration laws’, a set of legal reforms passed in former Soviet-block countries prohibiting ex-USSR officials from taking part in post-1991 governments. All countries which imposed lustration are democracies today, whereas all those that didn’t are rated “Not Free” by Freedom House’s democracy score with only a few exceptions.
In the caucuses, with Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, democratic movements were partially stalled by military intervention from Russia or Turkey. In the central Asian ‘stan’ countries, they were nearly nonexistent. Protestors were either shot in the street or had no ability to organize. In Uzbekistan, the president did not even bother to amend the constitution when he decided to stay indefinitely.
Much of this has to do with the political histories of such countries. The stans are landlocked empires built on corvee systems of slavery and absolute monarchy. With Russia to their north, Turkey to their west and China to their east they have few models or incentives to help them democratise. Russia was an empire also built on the labour of serfs and massive military mobilization. Its huge population was always treated as expendable by its rulers during wartime, and it has a long tradition of state suppression that the Soviets simply updated.
The question of why brings us back to the issue of ideology. For instance, why did Putin believe that by centralising power, killing opponents, and monopolising industries he was making Russia stronger instead of weaker? The answer is that he was simply doing what previous leaders had done.
The fact that Putin purposefully emulates Peter the Great and sees himself as a Slavophile philosopher is part of this cultural background.
As Putin came to power after the collapse of the USSR he naturally looked around for an alternative model of Russian greatness that was not based on failed Communism. The model he found was Tsarism, but being a product of his time his state now appears as a hybrid model between the USSR and the Imperialist Russian state.
From this short overview of recent history, it may be that a few tentative lessons can be drawn about the process of democratisation. The first is that states without a history of urbanised skilled labour associations like those in Europe, have a much harder time transitioning. The second is that large powers have many former models of government they can draw on and may be less affected by outside influence, and the third is that it is very difficult to create a democracy while keeping a repressive state apparatus in place.
Our Tsaravech
Much of this debate echoes the similar discussion that was had in the early 2000s about the failure of state-building in the Middle East. There it was pointed out that such states lacked effective legal systems and parliaments, and therefore the ability to guarantee the freedoms of their citizens.
After two decades of war in the region, the signs are not especially encouraging, only Tunisia and Morocco emerged as partly successful democracies while others range from bad to unlivable. Many Arab states in the gulf region operate similarly to European monarchies in the 1840s by spending vast fortunes on welfare projects to stave off feared revolution.
Although autocracy may be harder to remove in some places than others it is also worth remembering that the same could also have been said about South America, Eastern Europe and much of South East Asia which has democratised in the last few decades.
Russia — similar to China — experienced a rapidly growing economy in the 2000s and then saw a huge build-up of state power that ultimately resulted in a return to dictatorship from a period of relative liberalism. In both cases, a huge surveillance state was already present, and the constraints on power were minimal. The problem both states have is that there are no effective ways to stop leaders from dominating the political system. Much of this is caused by not having any effective legal institution that can stand up to the central government and enforce a constitution on it. Other checks and balances on power in Russia like opposition media, and gubernatorial elections were dismantled slowly in Russia after the Chechen wars, and then later after the protests organised by Alexy Navalny. After Putin hollowed out the legal system created a bureaucracy modelled on Peter the Great’s 18th-century legal system that was unsurprisingly ill-suited to the 21st century.
Because of these internal problems, it is unlikely that different responses from Western governments would have prevented an autocratic resurgence in Russia or countries with a similar history. There are some small things that could have been done, for example, a more gradual approach to privatisation could have been adopted in the 1990s, more support for liberals inside the country could have been given, and stronger sanctions in the early 2010s could have possibly led to a less drastic situation, but it is hard to see how history could have unravelled completely differently without strong domestic support.
Now, as an illiberal crisis spreads across the world, authoritarian governments may be simply forced to accept stronger restraints on their power in the wake of the revolution. After it emerges that tens of thousands of Russians died for absolutely nothing in Ukraine, it may be that the Russian public concludes that such a situation should never be allowed to occur again and that the educated liberal Russians who fled the country are able to return to enact such reforms based on precedents set across eastern Europe, though much of this depends on who emerges as a political successor to Putin. Ultimately, weakening the Russian state while allowing migration to more liberal Russian citizens will be a fine line to walk, but it is one that must be walked to aid the emergence of a truly democratic state. With all such transitions, the devil is often in the details of legal reform, but such movements, for now, need to be organised among exiles outside the country, with the hope that at the right moment, they can be acted upon.
While prospects for democracy have seemed gloomy for the last decade, with crises racking the streets of authoritarian capitals, they are now seeming brighter by the day.