Russia after Putin

There is a broad consensus that no significant change can be expected in Russia so long as Vladimir Putin remains in power. The big question is: what will happen when he steps down or dies in office? Quite a few experts in the West – assuming one can still speak of a “West” as a political subject with some degree of legitimacy – have advised policy-makers to work towards the disintegration of Russia, warning that Russia will otherwise pose an eternal problem for the security of the rest of Europe. To me, this seems short-sighted. Certainly, the West should continue to try to keep Putin and his political regime in check and to curb his aggressive expansionism. However, this would not solve the problem of the perpetual Russian threat. And above all, it would require the constant expenditure of enormous effort on the part of the West, which is already showing clear signs of fatigue from its exertions in this direction thus far. 

Just as large parts of Western societies sympathised with the Soviet Union during the Cold War period, quite a few groups in the West today see Putin as an ally for their illiberal, nationalist and geopolitical aspirations. As he attacks democracy, Putin is attempting to ally himself with opponents of democracy in Western societies or to use them for his own purposes in this conflict. These concerted attacks are not going to stop one day when the war in Ukraine comes to an end, because this conflict of systems has become a pillar for the internal legitimacy and stability of Putin's regime. And so it will remain until and unless Russia itself becomes democratic, or more so. Thus for the medium and long terms, the West – and the European Union, in particular – have little choice but to pin their hopes on the belief that there is still an inherent possibility of Russia transitioning towards democracy.

But what are the chances of democratic change?

If you believe the various analyses put forth by experts on Russia and international politics, the chances for such change are rather poor. Most of these sketch out three possible scenarios for a post-Putin era: firstly, things may very well continue just as they are or, from a Western and democratic point of view, grow even worse, under a successor to Putin, with internal repression and external military aggression. A second scenario describes a new Time of Troubles in Russia, during which several actors fight for power. In this scenario, the possibility of the country’s collapse and disintegration cannot be ruled out. Most experts consider these first two scenarios to be the most likely. Hardly anyone dares to hope for the third scenario, one of a (cautious) democratic opening. It is not unthinkable though that Putin’s successors, upon inheriting a country exhausted by external and internal wars, will decide that they must improve relations with the West again.

Do the people in Russia want democracy?

Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia for over 25 years now. He has turned the country into a personalised dictatorship that is waging a genocidal war against a neighbouring country. As dictator, he enjoys, as far as can be ascertained under unfree conditions at any rate, the support of a large part of the Russian population. Does this high level of support indicate that there are all too many people in Russia who want neither peace nor democracy? 

Without a doubt, there are many people in Russia who support the war against Ukraine. But this support is nowhere near as clear or as unanimous as it may sometimes seem. According to figures from the Levada Center, around 20 per cent of the population are ideological supporters of Putin. A roughly equal percentage dislike both Putin and the war, though. The large group in the middle are taking a wait-and-see attitude. Most of them believe that there is nothing they could do anyway. In addition, many people have fallen for Putin’s claim that this is not an (offensive) war against Ukraine, but a defence against an eternally aggressive and Russophobic West. Last but not least, many Russians believe that the country must stand together in a time of war and that any disputes would be better fought out afterwards. 

All the surveys conducted over the past 35 years have found that more than half of the people in Russia want to live in a democratic state. The key question, though, is what they envision such a state to be. Briefly put, many Russians understand democracy to mean above all security and social security; few understand it in terms of civil liberties. Their country’s independence is important to them, and in principle, they want it to have good relations with all other countries, including and especially with the West. The West continues to be the big “Other” in Russia, the standard against which everything and everyone is measured. 

What is holding Russia back?

The 1990s deserve special attention in this context. This decade is the key to understanding why large sections of the population support Putin. A lot of what he does are things the people in Russia want anyway. Paradoxical though it may sound, he is basically forcing people into something that, by and large, they like. Putin shares many of the populace’s ideas, hurts, dreams and fears. Nevertheless, one must not equate the country with its ruler. Russia is Putin. But it is not only Putin.

Many aspects of the interplay between Putin and the Russian populace militate against a future development of democracy there: the traditional division between “power” and people; the Orthodox Church, which is sceptical of democracy; the Russian inferiority complex towards the West; a society that is steeped in violence and chauvinism and remains deeply patriarchal in many respects; the widespread refusal in the populace to face up to the crimes of their own country; the taboo of Russia’s colonial past and present. 

Russia’s affairs with democracy

The dominant narrative concerning Russia’s affairs with democracy tells of a Russia that is incapable of democracy. Yet there have been numerous attempts to introduce democracy in Russia, and over time, these attempts have grown more frequent and longer lasting. It all began with the medieval city-republics of Pskov and Novgorod, which coincided with the first tentative democratic movements seen further west and south in Europe. In the early 20th century, there were two democratic revolutions. One in 1905, when workers in St Petersburg defied the Tsar by establishing the first Russian parliament. Then again in 1917, when they overthrew him in the February Revolution and a “bourgeois” government took over. Both of these affairs were short-lived. The Tsar quickly stifled the first. The second ended with a coup staged in October of the same year by the Bolsheviks, who then established their 70-year dictatorship. 

In a very delicate attempt at an affair with democracy during the Khrushchev Thaw, dissidents dared to develop a public language of law, using it to call on the State to abide by its own laws. Like other constitutions, the Soviet constitution provided for all civil liberties, including voting rights and freedom of expression, though in reality they were fake. But in the 20th century, even Soviet power had to legitimise itself democratically, at least formally. There were very few dissidents, and they did not get very far. But the seeds they had sown would bear fruit during perestroika. 

Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet Union gave rise to what is, thus far, Russia’s longest-lasting affair with democracy. The reforms opened the floodgates and washed away Soviet power. In doing so, they destroyed the Russian Empire, which bore the name of the Soviet Union in its final phase. The Russia that remained in the 1990s was a democratically constituted state, at least to a limited extent. This was a freedom that showed two faces, though, in a state that was not prepared for it: a friendly face, with freedom of speech and opinion, a flourishing media landscape, a blossoming civil society, and a great entrepreneurial and founding spirit. And a mean one, with arbitrary abuse of power everywhere, unprecedented economic crisis, a brutal and bloody secessionist war in Chechnya, and rampant crime and violence on an almost daily basis. All this culminated in the near bankruptcy of the state in August 1998, which left many people with the impression that democracy and the market economy benefited only the rich, the great and the powerful, and had nothing at all to offer the small, poor and vulnerable. Vladimir Putin capitalised on this feeling.

Civil society

This is not the only narrative of Putin’s time in power though. The other one tells of the rise of Russian civil society, and it is a narrative of self-empowerment. Over the 30 years since the end of the Soviet Union, millions of people have lived democracy in a very practical way through civil society initiatives. After a decade of wild and stormy growth, NGOs too became the targets of the Kremlin’s spin doctors. By the time of democratic upheavals in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 if not before, the Kremlin had begun to see them as a serious threat to Putin’s rule, and thus as enemies. They were seen as an instrument of the West, which was accused of planning to use them to overthrow the Russian government. 

The Kremlin began to gradually impose restrictions on what it called non-constructive NGOs. Initially, however, the new laws and regulations intended to make life difficult for NGOs and help the State control them had the opposite effect: most NGOs learned quickly, became increasingly professional and grew to meet the new challenges. As a result they were important crystallisation points in Russia in the winter of 2011/12, when Putin’s power was challenged for the first time following rigged elections. Two new laws that directly targeted NGOs were the primary drivers of the transformation of what had been an authoritarian system that nonetheless still offered opportunities for political participation into a full-blown dictatorship: the Foreign Agent law and the Undesirable Organisations law. Shortly after this legislation came into effect, Russia annexed Crimea and began the war against Ukraine. In Russia, one after another, the vast majority of independent NGOs were declared foreign agents – a slander that later was also used against the independent media, journalists and private individuals. After the mass invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, numerous NGOs were closed, and many of their activists and employees were persecuted and imprisoned or fled abroad.

The 30-odd years of Russian civil society were a great democratic learning experiment. These rich experiences of democratic self-empowerment undergone by millions of people have not been lost. They live on and will be as useful in the next democratic awakening as the dissidents’ experiences were almost 40 years ago.

Russia’s children

Russia’s children and young adults of today are members of the freest generation that has ever grown up in Russia. Like society as a whole, they are very heterogeneous. Some follow Putin. Some do not care at all about Putin. Others are his fierce opponents. There is a battle being waged for the minds of young people. While the education and training of children and young people remained largely uncoloured by ideology until well into the 2000s, this changed with the democratic upheavals in Georgia and Ukraine. 

The Kremlin began to pump a lot of money into building up new youth organisations modelled on the Soviet Komsomol. But there was still diversity and competition among youth organisations; the State did not yet have a monopoly. Like so many things, this changed quite quickly after the winter protests of 2011/2012. Schools and universities were also ideologised once again. Nevertheless, this collective brainwashing repeatedly comes up against massive obstacles. Young people in Russia are even less willing to be told what to think or do, especially when it comes to their private lives, than the population as a whole. 

This may be connected, in part, to their consumption of different media. Young people obtain far more information on the Internet than they do from television. Although the State is blocking more and more websites that it deems uncongenial, in Russia, unlike in China, there is no Great Internet Wall (at least so far). With a little determination and technical skill, it is still possible to access any information. Such determination and skill are also far more pronounced among young people in Russia.

Opposition

Putin crushed the parliamentary opposition and oppositional political parties back in the 2000s. Despite the monopoly on politics claimed by the Kremlin, Alexei Navalny succeeded in becoming a, or rather the, genuine challenger to Putin. The Kremlin considered him so dangerous that it first tried to poison him and later imprisoned him. He died in a prison camp; he may have been murdered there. But even after Navalny’s death, things are not completely quiet in Russia. Whenever it is difficult for the State to intervene, for example at Navalny’s funeral or during the so-called presidential elections in spring 2024, many people are ready to show their displeasure. 

A large part of the Russian opposition, at least the publicly visible and active part, is now in exile. However, once in exile, an opposition tends to lose it relevance in the home country quite quickly. This is why Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 despite all the danger he faced there. He had to choose between a life in safety in exile and insignificance or a life in danger but of political significance in Russia. He managed to maintain this significance even while imprisoned, through political appearances in court and on the Internet. As was the case in the Soviet Union, court hearings are one of the last places where the public sphere is reasonably unfiltered. Navalny, around 20 years younger than Putin, was playing for time. But he paid for his courage, which could perhaps be called audacity, with his life. 

In Putin’s Russia, opposition politics are now once again as close to impossible as they were in the Soviet Union before the beginning of perestroika.

What the West can do

In the 1980s, almost no one foresaw the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. No one was prepared for the challenges that this collapse would bring. We should not make that same mistake again. Admittedly, the task being faced back then was enormous. But it was this combination though, the combination of a completely new economy and completely new democratic institutions, which overtaxed everyone: the Russian State, the Russian population and the West in its efforts to be of assistance. 

People in the late Soviet Union, including Russia, had phantasmagorial ideas about the West. In their eyes, life in the West was so great and easy that any reality was damned by comparison. The profound humiliation that came with the fall in status from superpower to an almost failed state did the rest. Could that have been avoided? It is very unlikely. The Kremlin was too successful in placing all of the blame on the West. In this respect, the expansion of NATO to include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe was both inevitable and fatal. 

The focus of the West’s efforts to promote democracy was more on the formal, technical side. Figuratively speaking, more was invested in the hardware, i.e. institutions and normative rules, than in the software, i.e. the people. Then, too, there was the full-blown hubris in the West after the victory in the Cold War. It is simply not possible to democratise another country. Sustainable change must ultimately come from within. It is possible to support it from the outside at the right moments (which are not easy to recognise), but one can neither direct nor actively promote it. 

Back to the future

Putin has turned Russia into a country without a future (Lev Gudkov). In a time after Putin, there will be a new chance for the people of Russia to win back their future and democracy. The only possible route will not be a direct one: along the way, Russia will have to confront its authoritarian and imperial past. The most important resource for democratic development is not other institutions, but those people in Russia (and in exile) who have worked hands-on in the cause of democracy since the end of the Soviet Union. The people of Russia will have to decide which direction to take. If they choose a freer and more democratic path, it will be in the interest of all other Europeans to support them on their journey.