Russia’s totalitarian turn since the invasion of Ukraine is the culmination of 22 years of Putinism. From the beginning, when he first became prime minister in 1999 and then president in 2000, Vladimir Putin legitimised his rule by promising an end to the chaos that had defined the Russian economy since the demise of communism. He consolidated his regime by stripping the political system of democratic ideals, with Russia becoming less tolerant of the pluralism that the drafters of its post-Soviet constitution had hoped to nurture. The invasion of Ukraine is the biggest gamble of his long career.
Describing the politics of Putin’s Russia has never been straightforward. The American political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called it “competitive authoritarianism”. In 2006 Vladislav Surkov, a former key adviser to the president who has been nicknamed “the hidden author of Putinism”, coined the term “sovereign democracy” to describe a political system with the ostensible trappings of democracy but little of its substance: one that holds regular elections where the results are preordained.
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