Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began
The temporary weakening of an authoritarian regime may sometimes be conflated with a democratic transition. A transition, however, requires fundamental, systemic changes in a given polity. Most authoritarian breakdowns, however, do not bring about democratization but lead instead to a new authoritarian regime or state collapse and anarchy.
A democratic transition means the institutionalization of new rules such as tolerance of opposition, bargaining and compromise among different political forces, pluralist structures and procedures of competition, and the peaceful, lawful transfer of power according to electoral outcomes. In transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, political elites are crucial: They set the structural conditions that promote the institutionalization of new rules. Low levels of elite rotation tend to contribute to the resilience of authoritarian regimes. A democratic transition occurs only when an authoritarian government yields power to a new one operating within the new set of rules—something that is unlikely to happen if old elites remain mostly in place.
How pronounced does elite rotation need to be? Some scholars argue that democratic stability and consolidation depend less on the degree to which members of the new elite replace members of the old than on the ability of both groups to reach consensus about the new rules of the game. This view—that the will and capacity to achieve a “pacted” transition are key—is popular among scholars of Latin America who have studied the way regime and opposition moderates in that region have steered transitions from dictatorship to democracy.
In contrast, other scholars posit that the institutionalization of new democratic rules only succeeds when new people take charge of key posts. In this view, an old elite that hangs on and even reproduces itself will stifle the growth of counterelites and destabilize the new regime. Regime change will be more effective when members of the new elite fill vital jobs and can advance institutional changes without needing to make crippling compromises with holdover autocratic leaders.
This last scenario aligns with the experiences of postcommunist countries. There, the presence of “democrats in power” at the top correlated strongly with the success of the transition. From the Baltic states to the Czech Republic, people loyal to liberal principles were active in institutionalizing democratic changes and driving the success of democratic consolidation. Czech dissident-turned-president Václav Havel was perhaps the most famous among them. Strong democratic counterelites did not exist in a vacuum, of course. They were more likely to be present—and to exert robust effects—when a country’s civil tradition and potential for self-organization were also potent. The higher a given country could be said to score on all these aspects (strong civil tradition, self-organization potential, and counterelites), the better were its chances of maintaining a stable democracy.
In contrast, countries that were bereft of powerful democrats at transition time—the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan fell into this class—saw democratic practices gain little or no ground, while autocratic reconsolidation was swift. Across the post-Soviet space, the more likely a country was to elect members or associates of the old Soviet nomenklatura to postcommunist offices, the more likely was it also to experience a reversal of any movement toward democracy.
How does the largest post-Soviet state, the Russian Federation, fit into this picture? Some studies group 1990s Russia with Moldova and Ukraine as cases of incomplete or compromised democratization, where the balance of power between the old regime and its challengers was so close that electoral democracy became fragile and democratization unstable.9 I argue, by contrast, that Russia was one of the cases where the old regime retained such a preponderance of power that democratic transition never took place. Reforms were cosmetic. Old Soviet elites and their methods of organizing power relations remained in charge. After a short period of disarray, these elites reasserted their control over society. Russia is not a case of democratic reversal—it is a case of democracy never getting started.
Who Is the Nomenklatura?
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was never a political party in any regular sense. The CPSU was a state authority structure, the core mechanism of the administrative command system. From the Central Committee in Moscow down to the district and town committees in the localities, CPSU bureaucratic structures were the real ruling bodies of the Soviet state.10 To ensure centralized control over these bodies and their decisions, the Bolsheviks developed the nomenklatura (literally the “system of names”), which listed all remotely significant bureaucratic and managerial positions in government bodies and state enterprises. Employment in key positions in cultural, media, educational, and other spheres required approval by the CPSU Central Committee. The individuals who filled these posts formed the nomenklatura. They accounted for a tiny fraction of the USSR’s total populace. At its height, the nomenklatura consisted of no more than about three-million people, including family members.11 At the time the USSR broke up, it had a population nearing three-hundred million. That is, the nomenklatura comprised 1 to 3 percent of the Soviet population.
The selection process for nomenklatura positions was Leninist: deliberately secretive, centralized, top-down, and antidemocratic. It followed Lenin’s advice not to waste time thinking about “the toy forms of democracy,” and “to stop at nothing to [get] rid . . . of an undesirable member.” Thus all posts, even formally elected ones, were filled by candidates whom higher officials had recommended to the electing bodies. For example, anyone who had a chance to become a candidate to serve as secretary of a provincial CPSU committee had been preselected by the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee. The nomenklatura thus became an opaque, monopolizing ruling class of appointees chosen not for their qualifications or potential, but for their readiness to follow orders. They depended on their superiors, obeyed the system, and cared about preserving the status quo that gave them place and privilege in return for unquestioning loyalty.
The experience of being socialized into the nomenklatura had a lasting effect on members’ preferences. The Soviet elite took on a nondemocratic, patronizing role in relation to the public at large. The job of the nomenklatura was not to represent a diverse array of interests from society, but to serve the party-state, performing its tasks and guarding its assets. For nomenklatura members, discipline and conformity were key. Schooling, propaganda, special privileges (such as access to medical facilities or retail stores closed to average Soviet citizens), and the entire social world of nomenklatura members were designed to train them in lasting support for the Soviet ruling apparatus. Anyone showing disloyalty faced expulsion. The ever-present threat of lost status and privileges in a society where the state dominated so much of life ensured elites’ compliance and created strong incentives for nomenklatura members to internalize CPSU ideology.
By the late 1980s, Soviet rulers had grasped the need to change the system. At the top, the USSR had become a gerontocracy. Holding office until death had become the norm for aged and ailing leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, while junior and middling bureaucrats chafed at their blocked career prospects. The gerontocratic system stymied career advancement, and brought few opportunities for social mobility or prosperity. In 1986, the year after Mikhail Gorbachev became CPSU general secretary, the average age of Politburo members reached 68.
A mid-1980s oil-price crash worsened chronic problems in the planned Soviet economy. Food shortages and failing grain deliveries spread across the country, including even Moscow, the country’s capital. As the 1990s began, nomenklatura reformists led by Boris Yeltsin—a former member of the CPSU Politburo and a former first secretary of the Sverdlovsk region in the Ural Mountains—were squaring off against most CPSU members, who opposed reforms.
In Soviet Russia, nomenklatura reactionaries controlled the legislative branch, the Supreme Soviet. In March 1990, the first relatively free elections had seen supporters of the old status quo, candidates from the CPSU, defeat the opposition (independents) by winning a crushing 86 percent of seats. Across Eastern Europe, the only place where Communist Party candidates did better in the first postcommunist elections was in the USSR’s Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (soon to become the country of Belarus).
The executive branch—historically more important in Russian politics—was where the reformist nomenklatura found its strength after Yeltsin won the June 1991 presidential election with a resounding 59 percent in a four-candidate field. Yet even in that race, the competition had largely been among contending nomenklatura factions: Five of the six registered presidential candidates had been CPSU members at the time of the election, as had all of the vice-presidential candidates.
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