When Vladimir Putin took office, he inherited a democracy in peril and an economy in ruins: This is what the nation looks like 22 years on.
Russian Federation is a democratic federal state. According to international and non-governmental organisations that assess the state of democracy across the globe, it is an authoritarian dictatorship. Vladimir Putin, dubbed the "last tsar" by many, is the most obvious culprit.
In the Economist's annual Democracy Index, Russia ranks 124th out of 167 countries surveyed. According to the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, Moscow is ranked 150th out of 180 countries for press freedom. Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International puts it at 125th place out of 180 nations. As a result, the fields of study merge. They also capture the steadily worsening state of Russian democracy over the last decade. What's going on?
From the collapse of the USSR to Putin
On December 25, 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ball was set in motion. As one of the 15 former Soviet republics that became independence, Russia became the Russian Federation. A disorderly transition from a communist dictatorship to a capitalist, multiparty democracy took place in Russia after this time.
The nation became a federal and democratic republic in 1993 when a new constitution was enacted. As in Western democracies, the constitution safeguards basic human rights such as freedom of speech and association and distributes authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial institutions while asserting their mutual independence from each other.
The genesis of the reign of Vladimir Putin
Up until this point, we've just had the provisions of the Constitution. When we go from the Charter to the actual world, the difficulty occurs. When Vladimir Putin assumes power in 2000, he is confronted with an unstable Russia. Boris Yeltsin had nominated him prime minister in the past and he rose to prominence as a result of the crackdown on the Chechen independence movement. War, in a sense, was Putin's last drive to seize control of Russia from Boris Nemtsov, the politician whom many in the West considered as Yeltsin's perfect successor. Under 2015, Nemtsov was assassinated in mysterious circumstances. He was working on a paper critical of Putin's plans to militarise the Donbass. He was an opponent of Putin.
Nemtsov's death serves as a symbol of what has happened to Putin's critics, whether they politicians, corporate leaders, or journalists. According to the AFP, there were at least ten of them. It performed better than Alexei Navalny, the last big Russian opposition leader who was imprisoned. Analyst Masha Lipman says it's unlikely that Putin is personally responsible for these killings: "Unfortunately, this has occurred more than once in Russia, when powerful individuals settle scores with journalists they see as rivals. Because to Putin's policies, these individuals are able to resolve their differences and go away unscathed."
The first decade of the Tsar
This paragraph is significant because it reveals another another facet of Russia's power structure. It is true that in order to retain his place in power, Putin has developed a governing class that includes oligarchs who have acquired riches both in Russia's state administration and in the economy. Because of this, some consider Russia to be an oligarchy. The "environment," as Lipman refers to it, has supplanted the law, establishing a parallel universe where individuals who are members of Putn's circle may operate without fear of prosecution. The Russian president's favourite weapon, information, has a lot to do with this "climate."
It is easy to forget that one of Putin's first acts as president was to seize control of two of Russia's most popular independent media outlets, Ort and NTV. It was from that point forth that Putinian's twenty-year hoarding of the media landscape started. First and foremost, the Russian leader enjoyed economic success thanks to him: the GDP of the nation increased by an average of 7% each year between 2003 and 2008, with oil and gas being the primary drivers. Families in general took advantage of the boom and saw their buying power increase dramatically after the fall of the USSR.. However, the oligarchs, in particular, reaped the benefits. Those were the years in which Putin solidified his position as president in a permanent sense.
The second half
It is because of this that, when he has to resign as president in 2008 owing to the constitutional limit of his mandates, Putin has an easy game in order to get Dimitri Medvedev to the presidency and to take him back in 2012 by having him modify the Constitution on the fly (which it has recently redone). Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is no longer able to rely on the economic wind in his sails because of the oil price issue. With Georgia and subsequently Ukraine in mind, he returns to conflict. Armed conflict as a means of spreading propaganda and suppressing internal opposition. This is how Putinism has looked for the last ten years.
Putin has been steadily eroding journalistic freedom and freedom of speech since 2011, when he began to gain support from the general public. His oligarchs helped him acquire control of almost all of the country's national television networks and the bulk of the country's newspapers. Non-government and non-Putin cronies have been subjected to a campaign of intimidation. When the memory of Anna Politkowskaja's death was not enough, it was done by legislation, as those who punish journalists legally by designating them as radicals or foreign agents just for having spoken criticism of authority. With regard to the right to demonstrate, the same thing occurred. In 2014, a maximum five-year jail penalty was instituted for anyone who repeatedly violated the Federal Rally Law. The year is notable since it marks the beginning of Ukraine's war. As a result, Putin has strengthened his control over the country's internal opposition throughout the years.
On the verge of dictatorship
That "environment of acquired acquiescence and dread" that he and his oligarchs have built along with his oligarchs, that parallel universe above the written law, dominated by propaganda and the lack of strong individuals capable of resisting it from inside, was enough for him to obtain what he wanted. In addition to that, he exploited the conflict as a means of strengthening his authority. All the while pushing his nation further away from Western institutions, including as the G8 (which he quit in 2017) and Europe, where up until just recently he could still depend on German backing.
However, the invasion of Ukraine may have caused things to go awry. Putin expedited constitutional revisions that he had previously been able to put off during his last years in power. The most recent, which took effect in December 2021, practically transferred state authority to the president. Therefore, even if it is impossible to categorise Russia as a dictatorship right now, it has all the elements necessary to become such in the near future. Whether or if the march to Kiev turns like Stalingrad will have a significant impact on the outcome.
The author Dario Prestigiacomo is a prominent Italian journalist.