In Search of the Roots of Failure: Reassessing Russian Politics in the 1990s

Abstract The ongoing discussion about Russian politics in the 1990s revolves around narratives of democratization (which seemingly ended in the 2000s under Vladimir Putin’s leadership) and neoliberal market reforms (which seemingly paved the way for the country’s authoritarian drift). However, it is time to reassess the Russian experience of the 1990s from a different perspective. In this article, I argue that the political and institutional foundations of the Russian personalist authoritarian regime were laid during the 1990s. The process of the Soviet collapse significantly contributed to Russia’s succession of the Soviet state and its reliance on various legacies of the Soviet Union in domestic politics and foreign policy. At the same time, Russia’s elites and leaders in the 1990s had little interest in building electoral democracy (which implies the possibility of losing power through electoral means) and intended to maximize their power amid major political and economic changes. They intentionally rejected political compromises, effectively used political polarization at every critical juncture of Russian politics in the 1990s, and opted for the least democratic solutions. While democratization in Russia during the 1990s was sacrificed for the sake of market reforms amid a long and deep transformational recession, the authoritarian turn of the country was postponed to the future.