Why the Russian Democratic Transition Failed

Could Russia have put itself on a steady course toward a consolidated democracy in the 1990s?  At the time, Russian leaders vowed that was their goal, and Western leaders offered their support. Yet Boris Yeltsin’s Russia gave way to Vladimir Putin’s, which has traced a path toward ever greater authoritarianism. What went wrong?

In recent months, a debate has erupted among Russian opposition figures about responsibility for the failure of the post-Soviet democratic transition. Several months before his death in prison in February 2024, Aleksey Navalny, the charismatic leader of the anti-Putin forces, took to task the so-called democratic, liberal, pro-West Russian leaders of the 1990s for their cynicism, hypocritical betrayal of democratic principles, and lust for power. The elite, he argued, corrupted the democratic experiment and laid the foundations on which Putin subsequently consolidated a strict autocratic regime. 

After his death, his comrades-in-arms doubled down on Navalny’s critiques with a three-part documentary, Traitors, which excoriates the unseemly behavior of the prominent Russians who claimed to be engineering the democratic transition. Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, and his entourage of political and business leaders stand at the top of the list.

The expose sparked a heated debate in Russian opposition circles about the 1990s and the lessons they hold for Russia today (unsurprisingly, the documentary was ignored in official media). Some saw value in raising awareness of the obstacles to democratic reform in Russia.  Others questioned whether it made sense to sow discord within the opposition at a time when they needed to unite against Putin’s regime. Still others thought the accusation of betrayal was levied too facilely, without due consideration of the historical context and the inherent difficulties in transforming a country in institutional disarray, in which elites, and the broader public, had little understanding of what genuine democracy entailed.

The intensity of this debate among Russians will ebb and flow, but it will never go away entirely.  It will have far-reaching implications for how they think about their country and how they pursue democracy-building should the post-Putin era provide another opening for democratic progress. 

The Russians are not the only ones who need to have this debate, however. The West, especially the United States, also needs to come to terms with its responsibility for Russia’s failed transition. To be sure, the West does not bear ultimate responsibility—the Russians will always be the final arbiters of their fate—but it was more than a bit player. It actively sought to shape Russian domestic politics through direct engagement with Russia’s leaders and civil society activists. The results were often counterproductive, regardless of the intentions.

As I wrote in my book Getting Russia Right in 2023, the Bill Clinton administration’s goal was to integrate Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community as a free-market democracy “through a wide-ranging effort to assist Russia in its internal transformation in what [President Bill] Clinton billed as a ‘strategic alliance with Russian reform.’” The effort was focused on a small coterie of Russian leaders centered on Yeltsin, who personified democratic reform for Clinton. Despite his erratic behavior, he was, in Clinton’s estimation, on the right side of the historical struggle between democracy and dictatorship. More important, for Clinton, he was a singular figure, whom no other Russian was capable of replacing as the leader of a democratic transition. From the moment Clinton took office in January 1993, he provided his Russian counterpart unequivocal support, often against the better judgment of his advisers. And he remained steadfast even when the Russian leader took steps that strained, and at times flagrantly violated, democratic norms, as Navalny and his colleagues have argued.

Indeed, during the first years of Clinton’s presidency he frequently backed Yeltsin in ways that undermined the democratic experiment in Russia and tarnished the idea of democracy in Russians’ eyes.

First was a power struggle between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which erupted before Clinton’s inauguration. The administration accepted Yeltsin’s framing of the contest as one between his democratic, reform-minded government and a reactionary congress. There was some truth to this characterization. The parliament contained a powerful faction of unreconstructed communists and ultranationalists, the so-called red-brown opposition. 

Nevertheless, the Congress was elected in 1990, in what were among the freest and fairest elections ever in Russian history. It could legitimately claim to represent the will of the people.  Moreover, its leaders had stood resolutely behind Yeltsin in August 1991, when he defied the coup plotters who sought to put an end to the Soviet reform movement. They supported Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve the Soviet Union and build a new, independent Russian state. But they eventually broke with Yeltsin over radical economic reforms, which led to a sharp economic downturn and fueled widespread social anxiety.

The struggle culminated in a violent showdown in Moscow in October 1993. Yeltsin emerged victorious, after tanks shelled the Russian White House, the seat of the Congress, causing the deputies to capitulate. The Congress was dissolved. A new constitution was adopted that created a super-presidency, the powers of which Putin would exploit to accelerate an authoritarian restoration.  Nevertheless, Clinton remained unwavering in his support for Yeltsin in what was hardly an unadulterated win for democratic principles.    

A year later, Yeltsin launched a harsh war against the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Russia had conquered the Chechens in the mid-nineteenth century after a decades-long struggle, but had never fully reconciled them to Russian rule. As the Soviet Union broke up, the Chechens saw an opportunity to enhance their autonomy, if not achieve independence outright. Yeltsin, not surprisingly, saw the rebellion as a threat to the integrity of the new Russia state, a multiethnic composition in which various national minorities were more or less vigorously agitating for greater freedoms. In this complicated, ambiguous situation, President Clinton, in public remarks, implicitly compared Yeltsin’s decision to use force to keep Chechnya in the Russian Federation with Abraham Lincoln’s determination to preserve the United States as a union during the Civil War. Clinton thus legitimated Yeltsin’s brutality—which in the end did not prove sufficient to subdue the Chechens. The Russian leader was eventually compelled to sue for peace, and the Chechens in effect received full autonomy within the Russian Federation.    

Finally, the Clinton administration helped undermine democratic principles in the Russian electoral cycle in 1995 and 1996, which began with Duma elections in December and ended with presidential elections in June and July. The Duma elections were in many ways a referendum on Yeltsin’s economic reforms. To contest them, the Yeltsin team formed a political party, Our Home Is Russia, under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. It polled third, with 10 percent of the vote, behind the Communists (nearly 23 percent) and the mislabeled ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party (over 11 percent). Rather than stepping down, as a defeated prime minister would have in most democracies, Chernomyrdin remained in office, and with encouragement from the Clinton administration, Yeltsin used his extensive decree powers to bypass the now opposition parliament in implementing unpopular economic reform measures.

In the presidential elections, the Clinton administration publicly backed Yeltsin’s reelection against his Communist opponent, fearing that his defeat would lead to the restoration of communist rule and spell an end to economic reform and a return to hostile relations. Clinton cast a blind eye to the Yeltsin team’s flagrant violation of campaign regulations, especially with regard to financing, and its abuse of administrative resources to intimidate communist sympathizers and ensure a large turnout for Yeltsin. When Yeltsin suffered a debilitating heart attack between rounds of the election, the administration said nothing. It whole-heartedly welcomed his victory in the second round, even though his failing health meant that he was largely an absentee president during this second term with little energy or authority to rein in the corrupt schemes of his entourage.

The Clinton administration did not take these decisions lightly; it did in fact want to see democratic progress in Russia. But two other related factors weighed more heavily in its deliberations: the fear of a communist restoration and the deeply held conviction that a solid middle class was indispensable to the consolidation of democracy in Russia. 

A communist restoration was not merely a matter of Russia’s domestic structures. More troubling it meant, in the administration’s mind, a return to Cold War rivalry, Russian expansionism, and threats to the still-fragile democratic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. It would have undone what Americans considered their victory in the Cold War. In this light, Yeltsin’s democratic lapses could be rationalized as growing pains and justified as necessary steps to hold at bay decidedly antidemocratic forces. 

The administration might also have been right about the importance of a middle class to Russian democracy. The reforms that Yeltsin was implementing, especially the privatization of state property, enjoyed widespread support among Western policymakers at the time. They were consistent with the prevailing Washington Consensus, a set of economic measures thought necessary to effect a transition to a market economy. Once again, the Clinton administration could overlook Yeltsin’s violations of democratic principles on the argument that they were necessary to continue the reforms that would lay the economic basis for a consolidated democratic polity.   

The irony is two-fold: that Yeltsin chose as his successor Putin, who revived the Russia challenge that Washington hoped to banish by supporting Yeltsin, and that the economic reforms did not create a democratically inclined middle class but a predatory stratum of oligarchs, which became a pillar of Putin’s rule. 

Putin’s Russia is a logical continuation of Yeltsin’s, to be sure, but it was not the only or inevitable one. A more pluralistic, less aggressive Russia is certainly imaginable as a successor regime. The character of the current regime was only fully shaped by further developments inside Russia and on the global stage, for which Yeltsin and his entourage bear no responsibility.  As the Russian commentator, Maxim Trudolyubov, points out, if such a Russia had emerged, we would judge Yeltsin’s Russia and Western policy less harshly today. We might even judge them on balance as positive factors in Russia’s evolution. But Russian and American policymakers in the 1990s proved not to be that lucky.

This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.