A Time Like No Other: Russian Politics after the End of History

Abstract

Contemporary Russian politics is conventionally grasped in terms of a simple antithesis of the Yeltsinite decade of the 1990s. From the moment of its triumphant ascendancy on the eve of the millennium, the Putin presidency posited as the condition of its legitimacy the overcoming of the 1990s in numerous ways: political stabilization, economic growth, the reassertion of sovereignty in foreign policy, the restoration of historical tradition, the reconstitution of the state, etc. Despite the fact that Putin emerged to the forefront of Russian politics only by being designated by Yeltsin as his choice for successor, the regime’s discourse of self-legitimation has invariably articulated the ‘Putin era’ as an outright negation of the 1990s as the ‘Yeltsin decade’. Responding to criticism of contemporary policies, the apologists of the current administration, many of them ironically belonging to the narrow circle of Yeltsin’s ‘spin doctors’, never fail to remark that the present situation is ‘at least better than in the 1990s’ (see Pavlovsky 2000). The advantage of the present regime over that of the 1990s is apparently visible in all aspects of socio-political life, from the impressive statistics of economic growth to the sense of societal consolidation, from the resurgence of patriotism and the revival of cultural traditions to the more assertive line in foreign policy. The key word in all accounts is nonetheless stability, a sense of new-found certainty and security, coveted so much in the chaotic period of early postcommunism. Conversely, the most damaging criticism of Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev, advanced, for example, in leftist or nationalist circles, relates precisely to the denial of this negation by pointing out that the ‘farewell to the 1990s’, proclaimed by the current regime, is at best illusory and that at worst the regime persists, ever-more cynically, in the same political paradigm that characterized the 1990s (see Belkovsky 2005). In these arguments, the proverbial achievement of stability is reinterpreted as a cruel irony: not only is the Yeltsinite political regime maintained against all protestations to the contrary but, to add insult to injury, it has even managed to stabilize itself.