Russia under Vladimir Putin

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 31st of December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of Russia and handed power to a former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. The moment was striking in its abruptness. Just hours before, Putin had published an essay called "Russia at the turn of the millennium" on the government website, laying out his vision for a nation he called mired in one of the most difficult periods in its history. He warned that Russia faced "the real threat of slipping down to the second, and possibly even third, rank of world states" and called for tremendous effort by all the intellectual, physical and moral forces of the nation. That essay would win him the presidency in 2000, with 52 per cent of the vote in the first round. What kind of Russia would he build? How would the man who once lamented a divided and atomised society go on to govern for more than two decades? Those questions run through everything that followed.

• 2. The Putinism Idea

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  Andrey Piontkovsky, a Russian political analyst, published an article on the 11th of January 2000 in Sovetskaya Rossiya characterizing a concept he called Putinism. He described it as the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism in Russia, a stage marked by attack on freedom of speech, information brainwashing, isolation from the outside world, and economic degradation. The term quickly took on a life of its own, especially in Western media, where it became shorthand for a system in which siloviki, the military-security establishment, allegedly held much of the political and financial power. Scholars Julie Cassiday and Emily Johnson observed that since taking power in 1999, Putin had inspired expressions of adulation not seen in Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin. Another scholar, Ross, concluded that a mini cult of personality had emerged by 2002, built around Putin's iron will, health, youth, and decisiveness. The cult was not accidental. A document published by the newspaper Kommersant on the 9th of May 2000, known as "Revision number Six", outlined a plan by the Presidential Administration to manage all social and political processes through a single body. The document proposed secret activities carried out with the direct use of the Federal Security Service, including collecting information and applying pressure on individuals and organizations, creating conditions under which independent media could not operate, and establishing civil society organizations that appeared independent but were fully controlled by the Kremlin.

• 3. Restoring the State

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  Russian political scientist Andranik Migranyan offered a different interpretation of what Putin accomplished in his early years. When Putin entered office, Migranyan argued, the economy was totally decentralized and the state had lost central authority while oligarchs robbed the country and controlled its institutions. In two years, Putin dismantled the Yeltsin-era informal network known as "The Family" and ended the dominance of figures like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who had sought to privatize the Russian state with all of its resources. Migranyan saw this as restoring the state as an institution capable of expressing the combined interests of citizens and controlling financial, administrative, and media resources. Sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, who conducted a survey in 2004, measured the result. She estimated that siloviki made up 25% of the political elite overall, rising to 58% in Putin's inner circle of around 20 people. She noted that the process had not been a coup but a call to service. Her estimate of official and affiliated siloviki together came to 77% of those in power. Andrey Illarionov, an advisor to Putin until 2005, took a darker view. He argued that members of what he called the Corporation of Intelligence Service Collaborators had seized key government agencies, including the Tax Service, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Parliament, using those platforms to monopolize every significant resource in the country.

• 4. Economic Rise and Its Limits

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  During Putin's first presidential term, the Russian economy grew by an average of seven percent annually. A combination of economic reforms and a fivefold increase in the price of oil and gas drove that growth. The reforms under what became known as the Gref program ranged widely: a flat income tax, bank reform, changes to land ownership, and improved conditions for small businesses. By 2000, Putin had spoken to parliament advocating a flat income tax of 13% and a reduction in corporate tax from 35% to 24%. Jason Bush, chief of the Moscow bureau of Business Week, noted in 2006 that the Russian middle class had grown from about 8 million people in 2000 to 55 million, then accounting for roughly 37% of the population. The share of Russians who thought life was "not bad" rose to 23% from just 7% in 1999. Poverty was cut by more than half. By the beginning of 2008, a group of Finnish economists wrote, Russia had become one of the ten largest economies in the world. Yet the gains were uneven and fragile. The retired KGB lieutenant-general Nikolai Leonov, writing in 2008, said that within the period of eight years of Putin's leadership, "there has only been one positive thing, if you leave aside the trivia. And that thing is the price of oil and natural gas". When oil prices fell and sanctions followed Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, recession and stagnation set in and persisted. By 2013, according to economist Dmitriy Prokofiev, Russian residents' incomes had entered a decline that would continue for eight consecutive years.

• 5. Shrinking Political Space

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  After the protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011 and 2013, Putin presented a new concept of Russian democracy, which researcher Olesya Zakharova described as redefining democracy exclusively as compliance with and respect for laws, rules, and regulations, removing individual freedoms and human rights from the equation. Russian laws were rewritten to match. According to a study by the International Federation for Human Rights, about 50 antidemocratic laws were adopted during the period 2012-2018. On the 21st of November 2012, a law came into force requiring Russian non-profit organizations that received foreign funding and participated in political activity, defined broadly as any influence on public opinion or public policy, to register as foreign agents. Organizations carrying that label faced extra audits, mandatory disclosure markings, and supervisory powers that could suspend their operations for up to six months. On the 1st of January 2013, the Dima Yakovlev Law entered into force, banning American citizens and organizations from adopting Russian children and freezing assets of those on a government list. On the 3rd of June 2015, the prosecutor-general was given power to extrajudicially declare foreign and international organizations undesirable and shut them down, with no procedure for appeals. The Venice Commission, reviewing these laws, concluded in 2016 and 2021 that they constituted serious violations of basic human rights including the freedoms of association and expression and the right to participate in public affairs. In the assessment of Golos, at least 9 million people had been deprived of the right to stand for election in Russia.

• 6. Navalny and the Crackdown

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  Protests began on the 23rd of January 2021 in support of Alexei Navalny, who had been detained at Sheremetyevo Airport upon returning from treatment in Germany. On the first day alone, protests were held in 198 towns and cities across Russia. By the 31st of January, more than 4,000 protesters had been detained, a record in Russia's post-Soviet history. On the 2nd of February, Navalny's suspended sentence was converted into a prison sentence. On the 9th of June 2021, judge Vyacheslav Polyga of the Moscow City Court ruled the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Citizens' Rights Protection Foundation, and Navalny's staff to be extremist organizations. The case was heard in camera because, as the advocate Ilia Novikov indicated, the case file was classified as a state secret. At the hearing, the prosecutor stated that the defendants were extremist because they wanted a change of power in Russia and had promised to help participants pay fines. On the 4th of August 2021, an appeals court upheld the decision. Political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, an honorary senior research associate of University College London, wrote that after the 2020 constitutional amendments Russia had transformed from authoritarian dictatorship into totalitarian tyranny, driven by the convergence of a fully built repressive infrastructure and an eclectic ersatz ideology drawing on tsarism, communism, anti-Americanism, and revanchism. In 2024, the investigative news portal Proekt estimated that Russian authorities had prosecuted more than 116,000 activists in the previous six years, surpassing the level of political repression under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

• 7. Foreign Policy and Confrontation

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  On the 10th of February 2007, Putin delivered a confrontational speech in Munich accusing the West of breaking promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. John Lough of Chatham House called this claim a myth, noting that the Soviet Union had neither asked for nor received formal guarantees against NATO enlargement beyond a united Germany, and had signed the Charter of Paris in November 1990 committing to fully recognize the freedom of states to choose their own security arrangements. Andrey Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center described the speech as a calculated gamble: either Western partners would take his concerns seriously, or Russia would be free to chart its own course. On the 18th of March 2014, Putin gave the Crimean speech. Several Russian and foreign public figures compared it to Hitler's 1939 speech on Sudetenland, citing the same arguments and vision of history. In September 2015, Putin addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York for the first time in ten years, calling for a broad anti-terrorist coalition against ISIS. That same month he sent Russian troops into Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad, with the Wagner Group, affiliated to Putin's close circle and coordinated by the GRU, also deployed against Assad's opponents. The 2020 constitutional amendments, approved by referendum on the 1st of July 2020 and signed into effect on the 4th of July 2020, extended presidential term limits, gave the president power to fire federal judges, and constitutionally banned same-sex marriage. The Venice Commission concluded that these changes had disproportionately strengthened the president's position and gone far beyond what is appropriate under the principle of separation of powers, even in presidential regimes.