Russia’s Vestiges of Democracy

Elections were frequent in the Soviet Union but they had a symbolic character. In a country where only one political party existed, set on achieving the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, even the authorities did not entertain the idea that Soviet elections had much in common with elections in capitalist countries. Political competition in the Soviet Union was only possible within the ruling Communist Party and happened behind the scenes.

As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, independent Russia, now led by its first president, Boris Yeltsin, chose to adopt the Western political system. Democratic elections, allowing for the competition of multiple political parties with different platforms, embodied Russia’s “historic choice”. Throughout the 1990s, Russia’s political system, though flawed – as demonstrated, for example, by the corruption and violations that plagued the 1996 presidential election – was essentially democratic. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly, saw clashes between different politicians and their visions for the future of Russia. In parallel, the media, while controlled by oligarchs and their interests, presented diverging narratives, often critical of the Yeltsin Administration.

The system that Vladimir Putin has installed today presents a stark contrast with the burgeoning democracy that characterised 1990s Russia. Since 1999, autocratic reforms and constitutional amendments have eroded Russia’s democracy. The stripping away of Russia’s democratic attributes culminated in the 2024 presidential election that saw Putin gain a fourth term as president, making him the longest-ruling leader in the Kremlin since Joseph Stalin.

The Putin regime long made efforts to maintain a semblance of electoral respectability at home and abroad. Interestingly, though, while all Russian elections in the 21st century have been flawed, the Putin regime long made efforts to maintain a semblance of electoral respectability at home and abroad. Token measures were implemented to legitimise the claim that Russia was still part of the West and different from full-blown dictatorships such as China. In the Kremlin’s parlance, Russia was a “sovereign democracy”, a hybrid that still claimed the shared Greco-Roman republican and democratic legacy.

Such aspects as a tolerance in presidential elections for semi-independent candidates that could aggregate the anti-Putin vote, local autonomy in the regions, a system of repression that targeted only the most active of the anti-Putin critics – and, even then, rarely jailed them – and the subsistence of opposition print and online media characterised this token democracy and, up to the late 2010s, clearly differentiated Russia from the Soviet Union.

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Likewise, while election fraud remained prevalent, it was kept under control. Putin scored large victories at presidential elections, but his regime tolerated large swathes of the population voting for other candidates. Putin received 53.4% of the vote in 2000, 71.9% in 2004, 64.3% in 2012, and 77.5% in 2018. While obviously high, these numbers imply that until 2018 at least a quarter of Russian voters did not support him. The regime therefore accepted the existence of an opposition. Interestingly, the picture was even more contrasted at regional level in presidential elections. While Russia had potentate-type regions, such as Chechnya in the North Caucasus, where Putin received close to (or actually) 100% of the vote at presidential elections, other regions saw him get much less.

Held amidst the Russo-Ukrainian War, the 2024 presidential election was remarkable for the systematic discarding of the remaining and mostly symbolic vestiges of Russian democracy. Putin this time received 88.5% of the vote, an incredibly high score even by his standards. Likewise, no region awarded Putin less than 79% of the vote. In fact, even the four regions where he did not cross the 80% mark appeared as outliers. In Moscow and St Petersburg, two urban bastions of the opposition, he scored respectively 86.5% and 81.7%. For comparison, his score had been “only” 70.9% in Moscow and 75.01% in St Petersburg in the 2018 presidential election, already an incredible success for him.

The Russian regime closed the remaining independent online and print media outlets and jailed large numbers of political opponents. Beyond this, unlike in previous elections, no token opposition candidate was allowed to compete in 2024. Boris Nadezhdin, a former State Duma deputy who voiced mildly critical opinions and campaigned on an anti-war stance, was barred from the presidential election despite clearing the difficult hurdles to register and receiving no publicity in the official media. The Kremlin side-lined him at the last minute, seemingly fearing his sudden surge in popularity.

Overall, against the background of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the 2024 presidential election was held in a much more repressive climate than before, as the Russian regime closed the remaining independent online and print media outlets and jailed large numbers of political opponents. Its most famous critic, Alexei Navalny, died in unelucidated circumstances just weeks before the election while serving a 19-year prison sentence on made-up charges in a colony in the Russian Arctic.

The 2024 presidential election represented, therefore, a watershed event in Russia. On par with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it marked a qualitative shift in the nature of the Russian regime. The Kremlin abandoned any pretence at playing by Western rules in domestic and foreign policy. Shedding its façade of respectability, albeit by then dented, Putin’s Russia entered a new age in which it openly signalled to the world that it did not care about how the West perceived it. It became unapologetically authoritarian.