At The Dissolution of the Soviet Union, What Were the Prospects for Liberal Democracy in Russia?

Did lasting differences between Russian institutions and political culture vs western norms make the establishment of genuine liberal democracy (no, not Zhirinovsky) a longshot with a POD range opening on December 26, 1991, or did it have a real chance derailed by Yeltsin's incompetence, the deleterious effects of shock therapy, and other preventable factors? At the moment of the dissolution of the Soviet union, what were the realistic prospects for the creation of liberal democracy in Russia?
 
did anyone buy that idea back then? seems like the west actions were more directed to break the bear's back for good than to foment stable democracies in the former USSR, which seems to only have happened in the baltics.
 
Had Yeltsin created a political grassroots party, handled privatization differently, engaged in shock therapy reforms immediately, and been more open about the costs of the reforms, things might have gone differently.
 
did anyone buy that idea back then? seems like the west actions were more directed to break the bear's back for good than to foment stable democracies in the former USSR, which seems to only have happened in the baltics.

Some did, but among the people who could make a difference in this the effort was weak & half hearted. Too many leaders in the US, and elsewhere were so caught up in winning the Cold War & defeating the Commies they failed to correctly grasp the problems ahead. The 'End of History' trope is one aspect of this.
 
Some did, but among the people who could make a difference in this the effort was weak & half hearted. Too many leaders in the US, and elsewhere were so caught up in winning the Cold War & defeating the Commies they failed to correctly grasp the problems ahead. The 'End of History' trope is one aspect of this.
i know it probably is unrelated to the talk, but this "end of history" thing is hubris straight out of a greek story.
 
i know it probably is unrelated to the talk, but this "end of history" thing is hubris straight out of a greek story.

To be fair, Fukuyama has since admitted he was wrong.

To answer the questions: I don't think there were any real prospects. The dissolution of the Soviet Union wasn't like the Revolutions of 1989 - it wasn't about people rising up in disgust. It was basically a struggle of elites - and Yeltsin's elites came out on top.
 
If the election in 1996 hadn't been blatantly rigged against Gennady Zyuganov, I wonder what would've been the result?
 
I've thought about this before - is there something about large land masses and populations that make democracy and in particular social democracy difficult? Russia and China never had much luck with it, and India, Brazil, and more recently the U.S. are "flawed democracies" according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index. The exceptions would seem to be Canada and Australia, both of which are actually low-population for their size. (And Greenland, I guess, depending on how you view its relationship with Denmark.)
 
I've thought about this before - is there something about large land masses and populations that make democracy and in particular social democracy difficult? Russia and China never had much luck with it, and India, Brazil, and more recently the U.S. are "flawed democracies" according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index. The exceptions would seem to be Canada and Australia, both of which are actually low-population for their size. (And Greenland, I guess, depending on how you view its relationship with Denmark.)

The sort of maritime trade that allowed Western Europe and to a lesser extent Japan develop into capitalist powers was simply not possible in countries like Russia, China, or India, all of which fell significantly behind the West during the first and second Industrial Revolutions. And without capitalism, anything resembling liberal democracy or liberal social democracy was unable to take root.

In the modern era, there are many of, what I would call fake democracies that are prevalent throughout the underdeveloped world. These countries are democratic on the surface, mostly to adhere to international norms, but are essentially governed in a way indistinguishable from other underdeveloped countries. Contemporary Russia to an extent is one of these. They have elections. The voting itself is mostly not rigged. But everyone understands that United Russia will win and that the opposition is controlled.
 
i know it probably is unrelated to the talk, but this "end of history" thing is hubris straight out of a greek story.

Well, for a few brief moments in the span of history it did look like a real possability, if one considers it from the ideological lense on which it was espoused. At the time of the fall of the Soviets, there really WAS no effective challanger to the American brand of Neo-Liberal Capitalist Democracy in the sense of a hegemon for world order... the flaw was assuming that a defined world order itself was a given and universally desired. "The End of History" theory was built on the assertion (to use a metaphor) that the US had achieved checkmate... but diden't count on somebody just refusing to play chess.

The sort of maritime trade that allowed Western Europe and to a lesser extent Japan develop into capitalist powers was simply not possible in countries like Russia, China, or India, all of which fell significantly behind the West during the first and second Industrial Revolutions. And without capitalism, anything resembling liberal democracy or liberal social democracy was unable to take root.

In the modern era, there are many of, what I would call fake democracies that are prevalent throughout the underdeveloped world. These countries are democratic on the surface, mostly to adhere to international norms, but are essentially governed in a way indistinguishable from other underdeveloped countries. Contemporary Russia to an extent is one of these. They have elections. The voting itself is mostly not rigged. But everyone understands that United Russia will win and that the opposition is controlled.

Indeed. Liberal Democracy really springs from the notion that the government needs the compliance of the citizens to stay in power; usually in the form of their main revenue stream being direct taxation of the citizenry and their bureaucracy being a paid proffesional class rather than the former being covered by tariffs/profits from state-run enterprises/ect. and the later filled via patronage. This requires the average citizen to have a certain amount of taxable wealth
 

iVC

Donor
Too many supporters of the liberal-democratic path of society development were protected from life's troubles by a thick layer of the Soviet labor code, paternalism, egalitarianism and equalization. As soon as most of the shareware benefits collapsed along with the collapse of the social system and crumbling guaranteed working conditions and social protection, they immediately began to complain that the boasted freedom means only the freedom to lose a job, the freedom to be in debt, the freedom to pay for your medical and student accounts, the freedom to make mistakes in investing money and the freedom to find oneself in a dying enterprise without guarantees to retrain to a new profession.

This mass upset and rejection from unprepared population was quickly used by right-wing political circles and conservatives in the security and military groups, who used the image of the sky-heaven USSR to oppose "to a liberalism that did not justify itself, liberalism which drove so many people into the grave," and as a result, the population seeking Soviet social guarantees found that these guarantees have not been returned but the words "liberal" or "liberal-democrat" is now widely accepted as offensive nicknames.

To avoid such an option, I fear, it would have required a very gradual breakdown of the old society along with a very soft and gradual education of the population about a new responsibility to themselves and making preparations for a new structure of social and labor relations - otherwise all the advantages are canceled by massive disappointment and fatigue from unjustified expectations, and the masses begin to despise previously beloved ideas as betrayed lover despises a cheater.
 
Eh, I think a lot of the responses here are a little too deterministic. To be clear, all the points raised are valid. Soviet-era institutions, norms, and societal expectations; the post-Soviet economic shocks; the corrupt, disastrous privatizations; the conflicts with NATO over Serbia/Yugoslavia; state control over the media (which was increasing through Yeltsin's last term); the 1998 Russian Financial Crisis; democracy's weak roots in Russia: all of these made Russia susceptible to a descent back into autocracy. There was no singular moment either where democracy was fully snuffed out; it was gradual, and even during Putin's first term, there was real opposition to him in the Russian Duma.

But just because the conditions are present doesn't make an outcome inevitable. Let's not forget that the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia, ironically the first of the Putin Era, were widely seen by observers as being the most democratic in post-Soviet Russian history. You can make a plausible argument that Putin was somewhat better-situated than other rivals to establish a dictatorial system. He became president basically by acclimation and faced very little opposition early on because he was a cipher with whom different factions all felt comfortable. (Including, ironically, Russian liberals.) His relative youth also helped. In other words, Putin was both skeptical of democracy and had the means with which to erode it. An alternative leader might have lacked one or both of these. Someone like Yevgeniy Primakov, for example, would have hardly been a liberal leader, and in fact would likely have been somewhat more anti-Western than early Putin. But he also would have encountered wider opposition early on, making it perhaps more difficult to re-consolidate power in the Kremlin. He would also have long since passed the scene, and the result may well have been a less top down, pharaonic political system.

Now, I have a hard time seeing this as a liberal democracy. But it isn't crazy to imagine a present-day Russia that was still somewhat corrupt, chaotic, and illiberal, but still basically democratic, with a wider number of media outlets, competitive elections, and some rotation in office. Think of most middle-income democracies (like in Latin America) or for a nearer example think Romania, Bulgaria, or Poland. (Admittedly, the last one not so hot right now.) Or in a somewhat more pessimistic scenario, Ukraine or Georgia. In fact, this is what many observers expected in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the consensus among both domestic and international political observers was that elections had become too institutionalized in Russia for a real dictatorship to reemerge.
 
Last edited:
Top