Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began

Most scholars blame Russia's recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders - Yeltsin or Putin. This essay challenges such accounts. It argues instead that, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia did not experience a democratic transition; instead, it experienced a temporary weakening of the state - in other words, a weakening of incumbent capacity. The above is evidenced by the fact that elite rotation did not take place in Russia and the very same type of formal and informal institutions characteristic for the country's political system were preserved, which means that subsequent re-autocratization of the Russian politics was just a matter of time.

It only truly began to take hold much more recently, so to pose it a bit differently, what or who sank the democratic Russia of three decades ago, that is, if Russia shortly after the breakup was indeed a democracy however weak and fledgling, who or what sunk her: president Boris Yeltsin for sending in troops against opponents last October 1993 forcing through an executive-dominated constitution and for naming a virtual unknown, Vladimir Putin his successor?

I am afraid that the answer is to be found in nothing as contingent as bad leadership. In another perspective, "Who lost Russia? " is a meaningless question because Russia, from the point of view of democracy, was never really "gained." The Soviet Union broke up in 1991, but no real democratic transition ever did happen. Instead, the old communist system remained in place but with a few outward appearances changed: the old Soviet wolf in new clothing. For the most part, Soviet-era ruling groups and institutions survived at the top of Russian politics. One obvious exception was, or should have been, the market economy, but even there, old elites seized for themselves the most lucrative assets and positions.

It was only a matter of time before Russia re-autocratized. How dramatic does elite circulation have to be? Some scholars believe that democratic stability and consolidation depend less on the extent 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.

What is crucial is the will and the ability to secure an "pacted" transition. This argument seems particularly attractive to those scholars of Latin America who have studied the manner in which regime and opposition moderates in that region steered transitions from dictatorship to democracy.4 By contrast, some analysts have argued that the institutionalization of new democratic rules succeeds only when new people take charge of key posts.

From this perspective, an overhang elite that persists and even reproduces itself will impede the development of counterelites and destabilize the new regime.5 Regime change will be most effective where members of the new elite occupy key positions and can promote institutional changes without having to make debilitating compromises with holdover authoritarian leaders. This latter scenario conforms most closely to the postcommunist experience. 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.

By contrast, countries bereft of powerful democrats at transition time—the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenista, and Uzbekistan fell into this class—democratic practices gained 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 But where does the biggest post-soviet state, the Russian Federation, come in? Some studies group 1990s Russia with Moldova and Ukraine as cases of incomplete or compromised democratization in which 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. The old Soviet elites and their mode of organization of power relations kept the commanding heights. Such elements, after a moment of dislocation, succeeded in reestablishing control over society.

Russia is less a case of democratic reversal than a case in which democracy never got started.