Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began

Maria Snegovaya

ISSUE DATE:
July 2023

VOLUME: 34

ISSUE: 3

PAGE NUMBERS: 105–18

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ABSTRACT

Scholars often blame Russia’s recent re-autocratization on mistakes of

individual leaders: Yeltsin or Putin. This essay casts doubt on such accounts. It
argues instead that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced
not a democratic transition but a temporary weakening of the state (incumbent
capacity). This is evidenced by a lack of elite rotation and the preservation of
the same type of formal and informal institutions that characterized Russia’s
political system in the past. Accordingly, subsequent re-autocratization of
Russian politics was just a matter of time.

I f the Russia of three decades ago, shortly after the Soviet breakup, was a
democracy (albeit a weak and fledgling one), who or what sank it? Was it
President Boris Yeltsin, with his October 1993 decision to crush opponents by
force, his pushing of an executive-dominated constitution, and his disastrous
choice of Vladimir Putin as his successor? Had Yeltsin selected someone else,
might things be different today?

The answer, I am afraid, is not to be found in something as contingent as bad

leadership. The question “Who lost Russia?” is meaningless because Russia, from
the point of view of democracy, was never truly “gained.” The Soviet Union broke
up in 1991, but no real democratic transition took place. Instead, the former
communist system remained in place, with only a few outward appearances
shifting: the old Soviet wolf in new clothing. The Soviet-era ruling groups and
institutions largely survived at the top of Russian politics. One exception was—or
should have been—the market economy, but even there, old elites seized for
themselves the most lucrative assets and positions. The eventual re-
autocratization of Russia was just a matter of time.

About the Author

Maria Snegovaya is a postdoctoral fellow at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University,
and a senior fellow at the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington, D.C. Her essay (with Sheri Berman) “Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy”
appeared in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Democracy. She is author of the April 2022 Journal of
Democracy online exclusive “Will Putin Outlast War?”

View all work by Maria Snegovaya

The temporary weakening of an authoritarian regime may sometimes be

conflated with a democratic transition. A transition, however, requires
fundamental, systemic changes in a given polity. Most authoritarian breakdowns,
however, do not bring about democratization but lead instead to a new
authoritarian regime or state collapse and anarchy. 1

A democratic transition means the institutionalization of new rules such as

tolerance of opposition, bargaining and compromise among different political
forces, pluralist structures and procedures of competition, and the peaceful,
lawful transfer of power according to electoral outcomes. 2 In transitions from
authoritarianism to democracy, political elites are crucial: They set the structural
conditions that promote the institutionalization of new rules. Low levels of elite
rotation tend to contribute to the resilience of authoritarian regimes. 3 A
democratic transition occurs only when an authoritarian government yields
power to a new one operating within the new set of rules—something that is
unlikely to happen if old elites remain mostly in place.

How pronounced does elite rotation need to be? Some scholars argue that
democratic stability and consolidation depend less on the degree 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. This view—that the
will and capacity to achieve a “pacted” transition are key—is popular among
scholars of Latin America who have studied the way regime and opposition
moderates in that region have steered transitions from dictatorship to
democracy. 4

In contrast, other scholars posit that the institutionalization of new democratic

rules only succeeds when new people take charge of key posts. In this view, an
old elite that hangs on and even reproduces itself will stifle the growth of
counterelites and destabilize the new regime. 5 Regime change will be more
effective when members of the new elite fill vital jobs and can advance
institutional changes without needing to make crippling compromises with
holdover autocratic leaders.
This last scenario aligns with the experiences of postcommunist countries. 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.

In contrast, countries that were bereft of powerful democrats at transition time—

the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan fell into this class—saw democratic practices gain 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

How does the largest post-Soviet state, the Russian Federation, fit into this
picture? Some studies group 1990s Russia with Moldova and Ukraine as cases of
incomplete or compromised democratization, where 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. Old
Soviet elites and their methods of organizing power relations remained in charge.
After a short period of disarray, these elites reasserted their control over society.
Russia is not a case of democratic reversal—it is a case of democracy never
Russia is not a case of democratic reversal—it is a case of democracy never
getting started.

Who Is the Nomenklatura?

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was never a political party in
any regular sense. The CPSU was a state authority structure, the core mechanism
of the administrative command system. From the Central Committee in Moscow
down to the district and town committees in the localities, CPSU bureaucratic
structures were the real ruling bodies of the Soviet state. 10 To ensure centralized
control over these bodies and their decisions, the Bolsheviks developed the
nomenklatura (literally the “system of names”), which listed all remotely
significant bureaucratic and managerial positions in government bodies and state
enterprises. Employment in key positions in cultural, media, educational, and
other spheres required approval by the CPSU Central Committee. The individuals
who filled these posts formed the nomenklatura. They accounted for a tiny
fraction of the USSR’s total populace. At its height, the nomenklatura consisted of
no more than about three-million people, including family members. 11 At the
time the USSR broke up, it had a population nearing three-hundred million. That
is, the nomenklatura comprised 1 to 3 percent of the Soviet population.

The selection process for nomenklatura positions was Leninist: deliberately

secretive, centralized, top-down, and antidemocratic. It followed Lenin’s advice
not to waste time thinking about “the toy forms of democracy,” and “to stop at
nothing to [get] rid . . . of an undesirable member.” 12 Thus all posts, even formally
elected ones, were filled by candidates whom higher officials had recommended
to the electing bodies. For example, anyone who had a chance to become a
candidate to serve as secretary of a provincial CPSU committee had been
preselected by the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee. The nomenklatura
thus became an opaque, monopolizing ruling class of appointees chosen not for
their qualifications or potential, but for their readiness to follow orders. They
depended on their superiors, obeyed the system, and cared about preserving the
status quo that gave them place and privilege in return for unquestioning loyalty.

The experience of being socialized into the nomenklatura had a lasting effect on
members’ preferences. The Soviet elite took on a nondemocratic, patronizing role
in relation to the public at large. The job of the nomenklatura was not to
represent a diverse array of interests from society, but to serve the party-state,
performing its tasks and guarding its assets. For nomenklatura members,
discipline and conformity were key. Schooling, propaganda, special privileges
(such as access to medical facilities or retail stores closed to average Soviet
citizens), and the entire social world of nomenklatura members were designed to
train them in lasting support for the Soviet ruling apparatus. Anyone showing
disloyalty faced expulsion. The ever-present threat of lost status and privileges in
a society where the state dominated so much of life ensured elites’ compliance
and created strong incentives for nomenklatura members to internalize CPSU
ideology.

By the late 1980s, Soviet rulers had grasped the need to change the system. At the
top, the USSR had become a gerontocracy. Holding office until death had become
the norm for aged and ailing leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and
Konstantin Chernenko, while junior and middling bureaucrats chafed at their
blocked career prospects. The gerontocratic system stymied career
advancement, and brought few opportunities for social mobility or prosperity. In
1986, the year after Mikhail Gorbachev became CPSU general secretary, the
average age of Politburo members reached 68. 13

A mid-1980s oil-price crash worsened chronic problems in the planned Soviet

economy. Food shortages and failing grain deliveries spread across the country,
including even Moscow, the country’s capital. 14 As the 1990s began,
nomenklatura reformists led by Boris Yeltsin—a former member of the CPSU
nomenklatura reformists led by Boris Yeltsin—a former member of the CPSU
Politburo and a former first secretary of the Sverdlovsk region in the Ural
Mountains—were squaring off against most CPSU members, who opposed
reforms.

In Soviet Russia, nomenklatura reactionaries controlled the legislative branch, the

Supreme Soviet. In March 1990, the first relatively free elections had seen
supporters of the old status quo, candidates from the CPSU, defeat the
opposition (independents) by winning a crushing 86 percent of seats. Across
Eastern Europe, the only place where Communist Party candidates did better in
the first postcommunist elections was in the USSR’s Byelorussian Soviet Socialist
Republic (soon to become the country of Belarus).

The executive branch—historically more important in Russian politics—was where

the reformist nomenklatura found its strength after Yeltsin won the June 1991
presidential election with a resounding 59 percent in a four-candidate field. Yet
even in that race, the competition had largely been among contending
nomenklatura factions: Five of the six registered presidential candidates had been
CPSU members at the time of the election, as had all of the vice-presidential
candidates.

The economic crisis and the USSR’s sudden dissolution near the end of 1991 at
first deprived Russia’s political leadership of the organization and finances
necessary to concentrate political control. In the early 1990s, the central
government could not afford the salaries of its security agents and soldiers, let
alone its civilian bureaucrats and regional administrators. Delayed wage
payments became routine. The inability to maintain control over Russia’s security
apparatus undermined the repressive functions of the state machine and fueled a
crisis of state legitimacy. For example, in October 1993 President Yeltsin was
barely able to convince the military to engage during his confrontation with the
Communist-controlled Supreme Soviet. 15
Communist-controlled Supreme Soviet. 15

As the crisis weakened the Kremlin’s grip on Russian society, alternative power
centers multiplied. For example, to win his battles with Gorbachev and
parliament, Yeltsin made multiple concessions to regional elites. Between 1994
and 1998, he signed power-sharing treaties and various related agreements with
46 constituent units in Russia, often offering special prerogatives to individual
regions. Economic reforms that shrank the central government’s role in the
economy further expanded the space for independent regional actors to emerge.

Elite and Institutional Continuity

Despite the federal center’s partial retreat, changes within state structures
remained limited at best. The CPSU Politburo was gone and a small group of
economic reformers gained new influence, but at most levels of government and
public institutions, the middle- and lower-ranking nomenklatura groups were
holding on to power and showing scant interest in any reforms. 16 The
organizational structures and bureaucracy from the Soviet era were simply
restored almost wholly intact in post-Soviet Russia, albeit under new names.

From Yeltsin himself all the way down to lower ranks, Russian officialdom came
straight out of the Soviet nomenklatura. Nearly every executive, representative,
regional, economic, and military structure in Russia remained in the hands of
those who had run it when the USSR still existed. 17 The Soviet foreign and
defense ministries along with many other Soviet-era agencies saw little personnel
turnover. The KGB split into the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), but similar Soviet-trained siloviki ran both. My
own analysis has shown that through the 1990s, elites rooted in the Soviet
nomenklatura filled between 80 and 90 percent of all seats on Russia’s Security
Councils, the Federation’s main policymaking bodies. 18
The economic bureaucracy did see some turnover. To assist him with reforms,
Yeltsin promoted an influx of newcomers without nomenklatura backgrounds.
Their numbers and influence were too limited to bring radical change to the
system, however. In the upper ranks of economic policymakers, more than four-
fifths (82 percent) of those who had held places in 1988 were still there as of
1993. 19

At the regional as well as the federal level, postcommunist political elites

continued to come mostly from middle and higher CPSU ranks. Only scattered
oppositionists achieved election wins, and those were limited to big cities: Not a
single regional legislature had a majority from outside the old establishment.
Across Russia, regional leaders were mostly former Soviet apparatchiks. 20 In the
early 1990s, about half of all local-administration heads had worked formerly in
Soviet executive or legislative bodies, and another 20 percent had worked in the
Soviet apparatus at a lower level. Only about 30 percent came from elsewhere.
According to a study by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Soviet nomenklatura members
were 78 percent of Russian regional elites in 1992, and still accounted for 66
percent a decade later. 21

The heavy presence of the nomenklatura ensured that the new Russia would still
be dominated by many of the old Soviet practices, both formal and informal.
Soviet power networks with marked elements of patronage and clientelism
transitioned straight into the new Russia. Such practices showed remarkable
persistence in post-Soviet politics. Common holdover practices included blat (the
use of personal networks and contacts to obtain goods and services); “telephone
law” (the custom of executive officials putting backchannel pressure on the
courts and legal system); and ponyatia (unwritten rules or “understandings” that
govern organizations but are opaque to outsiders). 22

The continuities were not merely generic but literal: It was not a matter of similar
types of relationships carrying over from the USSR to the Russian Federation, but
of many of the same people in key posts preserving the same relationships with
the same longtime partners. Informal governance became key for the operational
needs of the new system. For example, in a 1998 survey, 57 percent of elite
respondents thought that Soviet connections were “very” or “somewhat”
important, and only 6 percent thought them “unimportant.” By 2000, a decade
after the fall of communism, about half (47 percent) of elite respondents were still
finding Soviet connections important. 23 So many posts were filled on the bases
of personal loyalty and connections that outsiders found it hard to gain entry.
Most of the newcomers who made it, moreover, had siloviki backgrounds and
even links to organized crime. They were not exactly the material of a new and
more democracy-friendly governing class.

Soviet political culture persisted in post-Soviet Russia. Holdover Soviet elites had
neither the will nor the skill to introduce democratic change. Instead, they
remained a nomenklatura, with deeply ingrained habits of loyalty and
subordination. Behind a formally democratic façade, Soviet power relations
carried on as the order of the day. For example, instead of bringing outsiders into
the system, elections became a way to resolve internal conflicts among insiders.
That was because successful campaigns required resources and connections that
the nomenklatura had a near lock on, with its only occasional rivals being wealthy
local businessmen. Even these, however, often had establishment ties and origins
that made them more like another nomenklatura subfaction than a democratic
counterelite.

At the regional level, elections mostly pitted sitting heads of parliaments against
chiefs of regional and city administrations. Nearly all candidates came from the
nomenklatura. The federal scene was scarcely different: In the July 1996
presidential runoff, Yeltsin ran against an antireform camp led by Gennady
Zyuganov. He had been a deputy head in the old CPSU propaganda department,
and was now leading a revived Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Other
possible presidential contenders like General Alexander Lebed, Yuri Luzhkov, and
Yevgeny Primakov all originated from the nomenklatura.

Ironically, Yeltsin’s appointments from the federal center had done more than
elections to open elite ranks to figures from beyond the nomenklatura. In 1991,
Yeltsin had suspended the use of voting to fill regional-administrator posts, and
instead named personal representatives to many regions. He did this in no small
part because he was frustrated by the lack of elite turnover in the regions. Even
so, he relied heavily on officials whom he had known personally in his days as
CPSU general secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast, as well as others whom
Gorbachev had promoted during the final years of the USSR. Thus the Soviet
nomenklatura was the source of many of Yeltsin’s people in the regions.

New Markets, Old Soviet Command

Structures
In the early 1990s, Russia’s economic situation was dire. In 1992, as Yeltsin’s acting
prime minister, Yegor Gaidar administered a “shock therapy” reform package—
suddenly ending price controls, freeing trade, stabilizing the currency, cutting
the state budget, and selling state assets—to transform the crumbling Soviet
economy into a free-market economy.

The persistence of the Soviet elite, however, distorted economic reforms and
nascent Russian capitalism. The state was de facto privatizing itself, and allowing
state officials to take full advantage of this process. New market relations often
relied on the same power networks and practices of informal governance
inherited from the Soviet times. 24 An individual’s ties to the old regime produced
the strongest payoffs. Nomenklatura members (many of them Moscow-based) had
the connections and capital needed to seize the opportunity. They either kept
their public positions in order to extract large rents from the emerging private
economy or moved from their positions to even more lucrative business
opportunities. Directors acquired financial interests in state enterprises that
were privatizing under their command.

Data corroborate this. Of the 296 leading business tycoons in the first wave after
communism, 43 percent had backgrounds in the Soviet nomenklatura. 25 The
individuals running state firms in 1993 were largely the same people who had
been managing those firms before 1991, and almost two-thirds of the private
business elite in 1993 were former members of the CPSU. 26 Up to 61 percent of
new entrepreneurs had once worked for the Soviet state, but even among the
remaining 39 percent more than a half belonged to nomenklatura families. 27

The change from Yeltsin to Putin had no adverse effect on the survival of
oligarchs with strong Soviet-era nomenklatura ties. In 2001, 41 percent of Russia’s
major entrepreneurs had worked in the Soviet power structure. A significant slice
of the other 59 percent had family or other ties to the nomenklatura. 28

Russia’s emerging businesses remained highly dependent on benefits or

privileges dished out by the government. The new capitalists thus found their
interests closely intertwined with those of state officials, with whom they already
shared values and nomenklatura origins. Thus, contrary to what modernization
theory predicts, the business class was often not a force for democratization. On
the contrary, it sought to limit democratic trends and impede further reforms—
including in the areas of economic stabilization and privatization—lest these start
moving too fast or in directions that officials and their business allies might find
troublesome. 29

The Nomenklatura Strikes Back

While Soviet apparatchiks held on atop Russian politics, the shock of the USSR’s
While Soviet apparatchiks held on atop Russian politics, the shock of the USSR’s
collapse and the weakness of the state in the early 1990s did weaken their
influence. As the decade wore on, however, they began to recover and
reconsolidate. Resenting their loss of social standing in post-Soviet Russia, these
groups “were inevitably filled with old-style ideas and attitudes, nostalgic for
Russia’s superpower or imperial status.” 30 And as Deputy Premier Sergei Shakhrai
said, “Many of them have shed their communist apparel but have not, on that
account, become different people.” 31 The apparatchik mindset lingered, as did
past patterns of behavior and the desire to preserve a secure and privileged way
of life. Small wonder, then, that the restoration of traditional forms of Russian
statehood drew nomenklatura support.

As reforms made their painful effects felt and Yeltsin’s approval rating headed
south, nomenklatura-linked groups pushed him to stall reforms and dismiss key
reformers. In December 1992, the Supreme Soviet with its heavy apparatchik
representation forced Yeltsin to fire Gaidar and name as the new premier Viktor
Chernomyrdin, a thirty-year CPSU veteran with dense ties to the old order. 32 By
mid-decade, the reversal engineered by the so-called nomenklatura party was
becoming apparent. Domestic reforms were slowing as foreign policy took on
resentful and even revanchist overtones. A symbolic moment came on 24 March
1999, when Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (Chernomyrdin’s successor) heard
that NATO had begun bombing Yugoslavia. He was on his way to Washington for a
state visit, but ordered his plane to reverse course over the Atlantic and fly back
to Moscow.

Yet this trend only gained force with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power as the decade
closed and the new millennium began. In the early 2000s, economic growth and
rising oil prices improved state finances and organizational capacity, and the
Kremlin’s public support rose. There was no longer a need to tolerate the
pluralism of the Yeltsin era. Putin then proceeded to eliminate power centers that
had emerged when the federal center was weak. He reinstituted control over the
regions, coopted the private sector and independent media, repressed
opponents, and manipulated elections to a degree that just a decade prior would
have been unimaginable.

The response of Russia’s political elites to Putin’s re-autocratization was

euphoric. To them, it meant that clear and familiar rules of the game were back—
the future had become predictable again. 33 Yeltsin-era uncertainty and
instability were gone. Putin restored the bureaucratic hierarchy that the elites
knew so well. He made them feel more secure than they had in years.

There were and are pronounced Soviet elements to Putin’s project. Rather than
creating new institutions from scratch, Putin chose to restore structures of the
old unreformed state that had been weakened but not fundamentally altered. The
nomenklatura reverted with relief to governing structures, recruitment methods,
and managerial approaches familiar from late-Soviet times, albeit in a more
modernized and technocratic form.

For example, Putin had put the legislature under the near-complete control of his
United Russia party a few years into his tenure. Not only did United Russia face
little parliamentary opposition, but its own meetings came to resemble the
congresses of the CPSU: There were long lists of achievements, storms of
applause, unanimous acclamations, and party elites’ endless vows of loyalty to the
leader and his “general line.” 34 Putin’s tendency to appoint military and security
officers to top political posts is also reminiscent of Soviet practices. 35 The size
and structure of Putin’s Security Council came to resemble the Soviet Politburo
more than Yeltsin’s Security Council. 36 By my own estimate, the Russian Security
Council under Putin has steadily drawn at least 70 percent of its members from
people with Soviet nomenklatura backgrounds. Other elements of re-
Sovietization included the increasingly insular and close-knit character of the
elite, its steady multiplying privileges, its paternalistic and domineering attitude
toward private business, its drive to renationalize the economy, and even the
restoration of Soviet symbols such as the Soviet anthem and portraits of Stalin. 37
The trend has become even more apparent since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022.

That Russia’s re-autocratization increasingly looks like re-Sovietization is hardly

surprising given the nomenklatura continuity at the top levels of Russian politics.
Soviet apparatchiks, a well-represented group in today’s elite, have simply
reverted to familiar patterns. My own analysis has shown that of the top hundred
members of the political elite under Putin from 2010 to 2020, around 60 percent
had started their careers in the Soviet nomenklatura or had parents who were
members. 38 The replacement of the nomenklatura is gradual, as one generation
slowly gives way to another. This reflects the stable nature of the system given
the absence of revolutionary disruption in elites’ composition. Thirty years after
the Soviet system fell, a small elite that in Soviet times never formed more than a
tiny fraction of the populace is still holding on to power and social status.

Breakdown versus Transition

Successes of early “third-wave” democratizations in Latin America and Southern
and Central Europe led many scholars to equate regime breakdown with
democratic transition and to label most subsequently emerging regimes as “new
democracies.”

Signaling this confusion was the tendency, in the 1990s and early 2000s, to treat
post-Soviet Russia as a case of democratic transition. The persistence and
enduring dominance of Soviet-era elites and their formal and informal practices,
however, should have cast doubt on this. Such limited liberal changes as Russia
experienced were a function of incumbent elites’ temporary weakness combined
with their realization that they needed to make some adjustments to the system
for the sake of efficiency (a phenomenon dubbed “the revolution of the second
for the sake of efficiency (a phenomenon dubbed “the revolution of the second
secretaries”). 39

Economic crisis left the state unable to pay for patronage, bureaucrats’ salaries,
and security forces. Alternative centers of power began rising. The Kremlin had
to tolerate competitive multiparty elections, but they yielded no fundamental
change: The old Soviet nomenklatura, steeped in antidemocratic norms and
habits, remained atop the Russian political system and preserved many formal
and informal institutions of the ancien régime. In 1993, former CPSU members
made up to 80 to 90 percent of the political elite in Russia. In Poland, by contrast,
the comparable figure was 30 percent. In Estonia it was 44 percent, and in
Lithuania 47 percent. 40

Thus rather than experiencing a democratic transition, Russia had a period of

authoritarian weakness—but even that did not last long. The nomenklatura
persisted, and its influence shaped the restoration of autocracy. The 2000s
brought a global commodities boom that filled government coffers and enabled
the Kremlin to rebuild state capacity. Putin quickly reversed much of the
“pluralism by default” 41 that had flourished under Yeltsin. Most Russian elites
welcomed this, embracing the end of the Yeltsin era’s seeming chaos and the
return of familiar Soviet ways. Civil society barely existed; it could do little to
resist the reversal. In the absence of functioning democratic institutions or an
organized opposition, the Kremlin was free to abuse power. The re-
autocratization took on distinct Soviet overtones as the nomenklatura, which had
survived at the pinnacle of the Russian political world, reverted to familiar
patterns of behavior.

Countries where autocracy has run into trouble but which lack structural
conditions for democracy have seen similar dynamics play out. This has been true
in many African countries as well as in the former Soviet space. The current
global wave of democratic backsliding has included instances of re-
autocratization in countries where democratic changes were never more than
cosmetic in nature. Backsliders tend to be countries living in the aftermath of
what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call a “democratic moment” that came and
went because conditions to sustain it were lacking. In this sense, Russia’s
democratic reversal is far from unique. The deck was stacked so heavily against
democracy that contingent events mattered little. Thus, even if Yeltsin had
chosen Yevgeny Primakov over Putin in 1999, Russia’s democracy would likely not
have survived.

Several implications of this argument are worth stressing.

First, studies of transition are too focused on individual leaders. In order to

understand transitions better, we must give elite composition more weight. The
proliferation of elite-focused datasets in recent years has made this task easier,
and will allow us to more reliably predict whether a given democratic transition
will succeed.

Second, if democratic institutions are to take hold, there must be elite turnover.
To be fair, some carryover of former elites atop new power structures is
unavoidable. Barring such elites altogether (even if possible) would be
counterproductive: They would become angry spoilers who might lead a full-on
antidemocratic reaction. Keeping a society running is always going to require
some continuity of personnel. Yet allowing old-regime elites to dominate the
upper reaches of the new regime is a recipe for democratic failure. Institutions
will not reform, and new democratic rules and methods will fail to take hold.
Pushing some degree of elite rotation will therefore be desirable. Western
policymakers could assist it by, for example, putting conditions on economic aid
to new regimes.
Lastly, nomenklatura persistence at the top of Russian politics is epiphenomenal
to other characteristics of the Russian society. Postcommunist countries that had
robust civic movements and precommunist liberal traditions found elite rotation
easier to achieve. Post-Soviet Russia lacked these, just as it lacked the level of
development, nation-building tradition, and ties to the West that other, more
successful cases of democratization possessed. Moreover, seventy years of
communist rule had homogenized Russian society. Largely missing from it were
the social groups (such as private landowners, capitalists, peasants, unionized
workers, and clerics) that aided transitions away from authoritarianism in Latin
America and Southern Europe, and provided the basis for democratic opposition
politics in those regions. Russia’s civic movements amounted to little more than
handfuls of prodemocratic intelligentsia scattered across a few big cities. With
only this weak force to stand against it, no wonder the nomenklatura found its
perch at the peak of the power pyramid so secure. Thirty years later, Russia still
features many of these characteristics, which should moderate expectations that
it might democratize anytime soon.

NOTES

1. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy

13 (January 2002): 5–21; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “Elections Without
Democracy: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13
(April 2002): 51–65.

2. Gary A. Stradiotto and Sujian Guo, “Transitional Modes of Democratization and

Democratic Outcomes,” International Journal on World Peace27 (December 2010):
5–40.

3. Ilia Nadporozhskii, “Influence of Elite Rotation on Authoritarian

Resilience,” Democratization, 21 March
2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2023.2186401.
4. Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative
Politics 23 (October 1990): 1–21; Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and
Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions
About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

5. Frane Adam and Matevž Tomšiè, “Elites, Democracy and Development in Post-
Socialist Transition,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 31, issue 1
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Copyright © 2023 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins

University Press

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REGION

Eurasia

COUNTRY

Russia

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