On Christmas Eve, 1991, the Russian State experienced the most critical turning point in its history since Lenin and the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917. The Soviet flag descended for its final time, and with it, the Soviet experiment. Yet, unlike the 1917 October Revolution, the fall of the USSR was remarkedly peaceful. The coup to halt the potential liberalization of Russia failed with no shots fired. However, it would be a gross historical inaccuracy to characterize the 1990s and Boris Yeltsin’s presidency as devoid of political upheaval and strife. The Cold War never saw a direct, open war between the United States and the USSR, yet still was composed of various proxy conflicts. Similarly, the 1990s was the decade of the “Cold Revolution,” during which political instability was present but never grew to violent rebellion. Using Dale Yoder’s definition of revolution as a change in the location of sovereignty, we can characterize three major political institutions that were critical to the decades instability as undergoing revolutionary changes: the legislature, the presidential electoral process, and the federal relationship. Thinking of these institutions and therefore the decade in terms of revolution, despite its relative lack of political violence, allows the application of the Thermidorian reaction to the second Russian President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
The Thermidorian reaction is a historiographical model of revolution that plots the rise of opportunistic reactionaries such as Napoleon Bonaparte in response to French Revolution and its reforms. After a decade of revolutionary fervor, Napoleon declared himself emperor under the guise of stabilizing France as a centralized state. We can apply this model of reactionary revanchism that follows revolution to 200 years later when Putin ascends to the presidency and methodically centralizes the state, with the pretext of injecting order into Russian society, to strengthen himself. The language of strengthening the Russian State, and the policies of stabilization are Putin's personal Thermidorian reaction to living through the Cold Revolution of the 1990s.
To understand this characterization of Putin’s reaction, we must contextualize the Cold Revolution and the three major institutions that irrevocably shifted. Boris Yeltsin had the difficult task of transitioning Russia from Soviet autocracy to capitalist democracy. Over nine years, however, Yeltsin would preside over the devastation of the Russian Parliament, the presidential transfer of power, and the relationship between the Kremlin and the various regional oblasts. The failure of these institutions contributed to the overall instability and soft revolution of the period. In 1993, Yeltsin faced intense pushback from the parliament over the initial failed execution of his economic “shock therapy” liberalization scheme. Yeltsin, having little appetite for compromise, abolished the parliament, and when they defied him and put up a new acting president, he promptly shelled the parliament into submission. As the victor of the confrontation, Yeltsin stripped the parliament of its oversight capabilities. This fundamentally altered the checks and balances between the executive and the legislature and destabilized the government. Yeltsin also facilitated a shift in a fundamental democratic faculty of the electoral transfer of power. In the 1996 election, Yeltsin found himself categorically unequipped to fend off his opposition, and so he turned to the plutocracy to secure his reelection. In exchange for positive press and campaign contributions, Yeltsin would rig the privatization of Russia’s assets to their favor. In doing so, he would secure himself a second term in office. However, he would further destabilize the institution of the presidency and transfer authority from the office to himself. Finally, Yeltsin changed the balance of power in the federal-regional relationships. The First Chechen War and Chechnya's success emboldened various leaders of ethnic-minority and industrial regions to assert themselves and receive political powers, from veto power over federal legislation, tax revenue abatement, and unilateral foreign relations. Each regional governor signed separate bilateral agreements with Yeltsin, creating an arbitrary and antagonistic system that transitioned sovereignty from a federal republic to a confederacy. The destabilization of these institutions resulted in the political instability of the 1990s, and gave Putin the opportunity to embark on a corrective Thermidorian reaction.
Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric entering office in late 1999 would reflect this formative part of his life and greatly inform us on how he intended to rule the nation. His rise to power was meteoric, catapulting from Deputy Chief of Staff to President in less than three years. However, while he rose through the ranks, he saw a state that failed to coordinate a stable relationship among its various institutions, and an opportunity to strengthen the Russian state. He described the state’s flaws and what he wanted to do about it in his Millennium Manifesto to the State Duma. He spoke of the desire to convert Russian State institutions into “the source and guarantor of order,” and having “guiding and regulating” power over society, for society must serve the state's interests of stability. Instead of a state that secured Russian society, Putin saw a lack of the capacity to govern and of quality governance. His language reflects the underlying reaction he had towards this period. He would choose not to correct the lack of legislative oversight, electoral fairness, or confederal incongruence, but rather undermine the perception that the state could not prevent Russia’s collapse. He would create a strong Russian state, with him at the center, and from that strength stability would follow.
Putin's first term was critical for his execution of his stabilization reforms that embody Thermidorian reaction. In these first years of his presidency, he created the umbrella United Russia party that gave him control over the legislature, empowered the state security services to deter plutocratic opposition, and enacted policies that nullified the federal system. Putin successfully nullified parliamentarian opposition by combining the two largest, non-communist parties in the country into United Russia, solidifying control over the legislature that otherwise would seemingly destabilize the country. He also utilized the KGB’s successor security agencies to successfully counter the oligarchs that had paralyzed Yeltsin. The widely publicized arrests of plutocrats such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Boris Berezovsky were an implicit signal of deterrence to the other wealthy oligarchs of Russia that the state would always supersede the power of their wealth, and the instability that came with it. Furthermore, by 2004, he made the position of the regional governor, the one that just five years prior had held almost absolute control over local state authority, subordinate and subservient to the president. The combination of these reforms are the meat of Putin’s Thermidorian reaction. They are all guided by the perception that the Cold Revolution of the 1990s was critically destabilizing, and his duty as leader of the state was stability through centralized control.
Vladimir Putin cemented the Kremlin’s role as the source of order through his series of reforms that brought the power back from the fringes and into his own hands. This vision of a state matured during the Cold Revolution of the 1990s and closely follows the path of reactionaries seizing control as prescribed by the Thermidorian Reaction model. While the model largely describes this phenomenon, it has key limitations. A particular caveat is that other revolutions that underwent a Thermidorian reaction, such as the French Revolution or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, all involved intense, brutal political violence. In contrast, the 1990s in Russia involved revolutionary changes in the political structure and the soveriegnthy of the state but lacked the mass beheadings seen in France or civil war in the case of the USSR. Therefore, the extent to which solely the Cold Revolution, as opposed other formative moments such as his time as a KGB officer in Dresden, informed Putin is ambiguous. His time as a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany, likewise also informed Putin on his views about what Russia needed. In addition, this ambiguity also means this path for Russia was not inevitable. While there were many other KGB officers and military officials who likely could have taken Putin’s place in the Kremlin, there were also liberal reformers, such as Boris Nemstov, who posed real possibility for positive progress in Russia. Despite these limitations, viewing the 1990s as a Cold Revolution gives that decade credence for the magnitude of change it experienced, and it is therefore no surprise that the successor to this period would be equally responsible for the change that followed. The reality is that the second President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, will be responsible for the infamous illiberalism he reinforced in Russian society.