I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.
Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I discuss some of the key developments in the country and in its war against Ukraine, and some of the takeaways going forward.
Taking Russia’s reins a quarter-century ago, Vladimir Putin said Russia had chosen democracy and vowed to protect basic freedoms he called the “fundamental elements of a civilized society.” What went wrong?
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
25 Years In Power
What’s remembered about Russia on New Year’s Eve in 1999 is Boris Yeltsin’s surprise announcement that he was stepping down and handing the presidency to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, a longtime Soviet KGB officer who had been prime minister since August and had cast off years of obscurity by leading Moscow in the brutal second war against Chechen separatists.
Less often recalled is Putin’s own address to the nation hours later -- the president’s traditional New Year’s Eve address. Reading it today is striking; Putin seems to signal that he plans to build something close to the opposite of the oppressive, authoritarian state he put in place over 25 years in power and counting.
Russia had become “strong and independent” under Yeltsin, he said, a statement he has contradicted repeatedly over the next quarter-century, including in his annual press conference and Q&A session last month, when he claimed that Russia in 2000 had been headed for “a complete, total loss of our sovereignty” and that he had pulled it “back from the edge of the abyss.”
In the 1999 address, Putin also said that post-Soviet Russia “has opted for democracy and reform,” and his main focus in the short speech was precisely the rights and freedoms critics say he has trampled over his long rule.
“The state will stand firm to protect the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of the mass media, ownership rights, these fundamental elements of a civilized society,” he said, adding, “The state continues to uphold the safety of every Russian citizen.”
'Sycophancy, Grandeur, Solitude, Distrust'
A quarter-century later, those freedoms have been drastically curtailed, and the safety of the populace has been jeopardized by the war against Ukraine, which has wreaked untold death and destruction on a peaceful neighbor and, analysts say, has badly undermined Russian security rather than improving it.
Whether he meant what he said at the time is impossible to know; his KGB background may suggest he did not.
But whatever Putin’s intentions on the last day of 1999, it seems clear that he changed -- and was changed -- over 25 years as president or prime minister.
“[T]he extraordinary experience of the ruler -- the daily life of sycophancy, grandeur, solitude, distrust -- in the Kremlin is so bizarre, so isolated, so dangerous that over the years, it molds, remakes and distorts the ruler,” Simon Sebag Montefiore, a historian who has written books about rulers from the Romanov dynasty to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, wrote in a post on X.
Referring to Stalin, Putin, and others who ruled the country, Montefiore wrote that “once they wore the crown, its situation remade them.”
“Those who knew Putin in first term say he was different; he certainly presented himself as a moderate reformer but he also had to learn how to behave,” he went on. “The awkward clumsiness of his reaction to the loss of the Kursk submarine couldn’t be more different than the confident showman riding his steed through Siberian taiga or the masterful hucksterism of his annual press conference.”
The sinking of the Kursk in August 2000, early in Putin’s first term, was one of a number of disasters, developments, and deeds that shaped Russia and his rule. A drastically abridged list of the others includes the Beslan hostage crisis in 2004, the Bolotnaya protests in 2011-12, and the Maidan in Ukraine -- the massive protests that pushed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych from power in Kyiv in February 2014. The poisoning, prosecution, and prison death of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny is another.
'Increasingly Paranoid'
Putin reacted to the Maidan by seizing the Crimean Peninsula and fomenting war in the Donbas region in an attempt to gain control of Ukraine. After that effort failed, he launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, an unprovoked attack that continues nearly three years later.
It didn’t have to be this way, even given Putin’s decision to return to the presidency Kremlin in 2012 after a stint as prime minister and his refusal to quit the Kremlin in 2024, a departure he avoided in advance by changing the constitution.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the spiraling clampdown in Russia, the mounting confrontation with the West: “None of it is foreordained,” said analyst Mark Galeotti, an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
“It's not as if he couldn't actually have changed his policies at different times,” Galeotti told RFE/RL, “but this is the trajectory he was on -- this increasingly suspicious, increasingly paranoid sense” that he faces threats from forces at home and abroad.
Like Ivan IV, the 16th century tsar known as Ivan the Terrible, Putin “was a state builder at first and increasingly has been a state breaker,” Galeotti said. At some point, he added, Putin “decided…his own ambitions were more important than the interests of his country.”
That's it from me for this week. If you want to know more, catch up on my The Week Ahead in Russia podcast, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).
Yours,
Steve Gutterman
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