Regarding the political regime dimension, two attempts at Russia’s democratization—after the monarchy was overthrown in 1917 and after the collapse of Communism in 1991—have failed. The former resulted in civil war, and the latter coincided with the breakdown of the Soviet state. In both cases, these failures paved the way for the emergence of authoritarian regimes on the ruins of unfulfilled democratic promises. However, the Soviet authoritarian modernization under Stalin caused a colossal number of victims and heavy losses of human potential while its economic achievements were questionable.56 The post-Stalin rejection of repressions as the main tool of governing the country brought mixed consequences to Soviet socioeconomic development, and over time the potential of Soviet modernization was completely exhausted.57 The post-Soviet authoritarian modernization project, to some extent, also emerged on the ruins of unfulfilled promises of democratization and economic reforms under Gorbachev,58 while the mixed results of the market changes of the 1990s after the Soviet collapse contributed to the rise of the Russian economy in the 2000s59 against the background of increasing authoritarian tendencies.
The electoral authoritarian regime that emerged in Russia after the Soviet collapse of the USSR is not unique, but it has several features defined by the pattern of post-Communist transformation. In the 1990s, policy reforms faced the problem of a weak state with a high level of horizontal and vertical fragmentation.60 As a result, the central government resorted to compromises with oligarchs and regional leaders, which raised the social costs of the reforms.61 Strengthening state capacity, alongside the rapid economic growth of the 2000s, allowed the central government to implement its policies relatively successfully and reduce the influence of oligarchs and regional leaders alike.62 But the poor quality of public administration and the bureaucracy’s inefficiency were major constraints.63 By the time of the Soviet collapse, the bureaucratic machine had already been suffering from deep institutional decay, and the post-Soviet period deepened these problems. Electoral authoritarianism provided incentives for the use of the state apparatus to maximize electoral results64 to the detriment of the quality of governance, as the Kremlin preferred loyalty rather than efficiency in political appointments.65 The regime’s dependence on buying electoral loyalty, so vividly visible in the 1990s,66 increased further still in the 2000s and in the 2010s.67 In sum, such a combination of features of Russia’s regime created the main barriers to the authoritarian modernization project.
Finally, ideas and perceptions also affected the authoritarian modernization project in Russia. While Soviet authoritarian modernization was driven by the ideas of Communism and by the ambition of building a new international role model for other societies, the post-Soviet ideational agenda was different in many ways. First, in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Russia, ideas played a relatively negligible role vis-à-vis the material interests of elites and of society at large.68 Second, for the political leaders who came to power in Russia in the 2000s, the perceptions of “a good Soviet Union”—an updated version of political, economic, and international system of the past, which would demonstrate a good performance and avoid risks of major changes—served as a role model that determined their ideational frame of reference.69 To some extent, these tendencies also resulted from overreaction by elites and the mass public to the collapse of Communism and of the Soviet Union. But in practice, retrospectively oriented worldviews are hardly conducive to any modernization projects, including authoritarian ones. Perceptions of an existential threat to the political status quo (which were driven by the wave of regime changes in post-Soviet Eurasia, labeled “color revolutions”) also impeded modernization plans because of shortening time horizons for elites and because of the need to divert the state’s resources to buying the loyalty of elites and the masses alike.70 In addition, the regime’s focus on media manipulation, which serves as a major tool for maintaining contemporary authoritarian regimes (known as informational autocracies),71 contributed to misperceptions not only among society at large but also among elites who often made ill-suited decisions because of a lack of independent sources of information and inappropriate feedback. For as long as Russia experienced rapid economic growth from 1999 to 2008, these regime-induced flaws of the authoritarian modernization project were partly compensated for by the inflow of money, which was sufficient for keeping the winning coalition together and avoiding major schisms among elites and public demand for changes. In the 2010s, against the background of rising economic problems and major conflict with the West, the risk of regime disequilibrium greatly increased,72 and the authoritarian modernization project in Russia came under question.
Still, the “myth of authoritarian growth”73 remained a mainstream of Russia’s approach to socioeconomic development and policy-making after the Soviet collapse against the background of strong statist and illiberal components of thinking among Russian elites.74 No democratic alternatives for modernization projects regarding the agenda of socioeconomic development were discussed seriously, and these issues lie at the heart of policies followed both in the conflict-ridden 1990s75 and during the period of “imposed consensus” of the 2000s.76 However, a positive combination of factors brought certain successes using this approach during the wave of policy reforms launched in the early 2000s, which may be regarded as the golden age of Russia’s authoritarian modernization project. The overcoming of the protracted transformation recession of the 1990s, the restoration of the coercive capacity of the Russian state, the major recentralization of governance, and the consolidation of the Russian elites, as well as prudent technocratic solutions in certain areas such as tax and fiscal reforms, resulted in numerous advancements in Russia’s socioeconomic development in various fields.77 As one can observe from figures 1 through 4, the period between 2000 and 2005 was very productive for improving the quality of governance in Russia in terms of the rule of law, control of corruption, regulatory quality, and government effectiveness. This improvement largely reflected the effects of policy reforms, which are analyzed in more detail in chapter 4.
Yet one cannot step into the same river twice: the widely proclaimed proposal of modernization made by Dmitry Medvedev during his presidency78 was just a brief campaign with an emphasis on technological advancements (such as high-tech development and other innovations). This campaign faced major structural and institutional constraints, and during the turbulent political changes of the 2010s it brought partial and controversial results. These results were accompanied by major instances of misbehavior by state officials79 or even faded away entirely. In fact, the modernization campaign has nearly been forgotten by the Russian public at the moment of writing this book and had rather negligible impact on the dynamics of the quality of governance in Russia. However, the boom of the 2000s is still perceived as a kind of model for the modernization project in Russia, even though it was a context-bounded phenomenon.