When did it all go so horribly wrong? The Russian opposition turns to introspection

By Dr. Ilya Matveev, Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley

Recently, the Navalny channel on YouTube released a series of documentary videos about the 1990s created by Maria Pevchikh, the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s (ACF) current director (three videos have been released in total).

The videos are unusual for the Navalny team. So far, the ACF’s investigations have focused on the present. They were produced with a clear political goal in mind: to undermine the legitimacy of Putin’s regime and to catalyze opposition activities. Moreover, the ACF’s output focused overwhelmingly on facts and their documentary evidence, avoiding broader political and ideological discussion. This time, however, the videos were dedicated to the past, making their immediate political significance rather unclear to the viewer. They called for the broad reconsideration of a historical period that has been quite contentious in Russian public opinion. As such, they were bound to produce heated discussion and even controversy of a kind the ACF had previously tried to avoid. And that is exactly what happened – the videos, with solid but not record-breaking viewership numbers, proved to be absolutely unique for the ACF in terms of the breadth and intensity of the response from activists, opposition politicians, intellectuals and the politicized public.

The ACF’s latest documentary series with the heavy title Traitors raises complex questions about the 1990s as a myth and the 1990s as an actual historical period that had consequences for the present; questions about opposition strategy, communication style and political platform; and finally, questions about Russia’s possible future - that is inherently bound with our relationship to the past. In this essay, I will address each of these questions in turn.

IN THE 1990s, EVERYONE WAS RUNNING NAKED

The last decade of the twentieth century has long been a contested myth in Russia, referenced by the ironic lyrics of Monetochka’s song 90: ‘In the 1990s, people were killed and everyone was running naked’. For many Russians, the chaotic, incongruous nature of this myth originates from lived experience. It was a decade of terrible economic upheaval, with a 40% drop in the GDP that was unprecedented for a country not fighting a foreign invasion. Economic problems were combined with state weakness and the corresponding physical insecurity, as well as the loss of a shared value system and collective identity. Unsurprisingly, for the vast majority of the population, the experience of the 1990s was strictly negative.

According to the Levada Center poll conducted in 2020, 42% of respondents claimed that they could not remember a single good thing about the decade, while another 21% did not answer the question at all. 62% of respondents believed that the 1990s brought more bad things than good things for the country and only 19% thought the opposite, with another 19% giving no answer. While memory and historical imagination are certainly affected by lived experience, they are also influenced by culture and politics. After all, some of Levada’s respondents who expressed a negative opinion of the 1990s were simply too young to have lived through it. The Kremlin has worked hard to consolidate the myth of the ‘wild nineties’ (likhie devyanostye), pushing through its own interpretation, in which economic hardship and social anomie were combined with alleged foreign interference in Russian affairs and Russia’s loss of ‘sovereignty’, which was supposedly restored during the Putin years. For a long time, contrasting Putin’s period with the ‘wild nineties’ has been one of the most effective tropes of Kremlin propaganda.

In the opposition milieu, however, a different image of the 1990s has prevailed. Many liberal-minded members of the opposition who lived through the 1990s were privileged in ways they never reflected on. Muscovites, for example, had a much milder experience of the decade than the rest of the country because of Moscow’s vast resources and the paternalistic social policies of mayor Yuri Luzhkov.

Muscovites remember the 1990s differently than Russians from other parts of the country precisely because of their privileged position at the time. Moreover, the lived experience of the decade depended on the profession. For the majority of Russians, the 1990s involved the crashing of the Soviet-era industries, the non-payment of wages and the lack of formal employment opportunities that prompted them to eke out a living in an informal or even subsistence economy.

For the activists and intellectuals, however, the 1990s were a time of new beginnings – new projects and opportunities, often supported by Western institutions and individuals. The positive contrast with the Soviet period was particularly strong due to the lack of intellectual and political freedoms in the Soviet Union. This is another reason why many liberal-minded opposition figures remember the 1990s differently than the rest of the country - it was a time that allowed them to flourish intellectually and professionally. Finally, there is the issue of liberal politics itself: many liberals who are currently in opposition to Putinism supported elements of liberalism in the 1990s politics and associated Putinism with the defeat of the liberal idea in Russia.

All three factors – privilege, social-professional status and ideological attachment – reinforce each other. They produce an image of the 1990s that is vastly different from the one held by the majority of Russians; an alternative historical myth. In a telling example, the journalist and academic Sergei Medvedev claimed to have lived in poverty in the 1990s just like everyone else, but he remembered ‘the feeling of unbearable happiness, of a vast world, of endless choices’. In the same paragraph, however, he noted that he ‘had to rent out his Moscow apartment’ to get some extra cash – something the majority of Russians could not relate to, as they simply did not live in Moscow nor owned an apartment there. In addition, Medvedev mentioned ‘Western guests and foundations’ as well as an invitation to publish a magazine – again, experiences completely alien to the majority of Russians. In the end, Medvedev’s passionate defense of the 1990s as an ‘experience of freedom’ only served to prevent him from developing a political platform that could be attractive, or even simply comprehensible, to the majority.

The two myths – the ‘wild nineties’ and the ‘decade of freedom’ – complement each other perfectly. Kremlin propaganda posits a sharp break between the 1990s and Putin’s period – but the liberal narrative does the same. For the Kremlin, the ‘wild nineties’ have been replaced by Putin’s stability. For the liberals, the ‘decade of freedom’ has given way to unfreedom and authoritarianism. While the two camps assess the historical periods differently, they agree on their incommensurability. However, the Kremlin's narrative resonates with the majority, while the opposition narrative can only attract a minority. In fact, the myth of the 1990s as a ‘decade of freedom’ contributes to the isolation and marginalization of the opposition movement. For the minority, it provides narcissistic enjoyment (‘I am better than them’, meaning ordinary Russians, whom Sergei Medvedev openly calls ‘slaves’), but at the same time it deprives the opposition of the very possibility of becoming a majority movement in the future.

Alexei Navalny, with his keen political sense, understood the stakes in this clash of memories and historical myths very well. His chief political principle had always been a staunch refusal to accept being in the minority. Instead, he sought to develop a platform that would both oppose Putinism and resonate with the majority. This led him to rethink the legacies of the 1990s in a way that was unprecedented for a liberal opposition leader. Back in January 2020, a few months before his poisoning, when Putin first announced the constitutional amendments, he tweeted that the ‘Russian constitution is despicable. It contains the mechanism of the usurpation of power’. With this tweet alone, he shifted the discussion in a powerful way, highlighting the connection between the 1990s, when the Russian constitution was adopted, and the present. Even with this short observation, he received a lot of pushback. For example, Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, called Navalny’s intervention ‘the worst in the last 10 years’. Nevertheless, Navalny continued on this path.

In August 2023, he sent a dispatch from prison titled My fear and loathing. In this manifesto, he blamed the political and economic elites of the 1990s for squandering Russia’s chance at democracy and enabling Putinism. Besides the 1993 constitution that gave the president extraordinary powers, he mentioned widespread corruption and unchecked greed, media manipulation, the hijacking of the electoral process by Yeltsin in 1996, persecution of Yeltsin’s political opponents and the two Chechen wars.

For Navalny, the purpose of this historical exercise was to highlight the wrong choices that were made at a time when Russia was at a crossroads – for he believed that such a time would arrive again. But his manifesto accomplished another goal as well. Politically, it has done away with a sharp distinction between the 1990s and Putin’s period – a distinction embraced by both Kremlin propaganda and opposition narratives. Instead, Navalny showed that Putinism is a natural outgrowth of the negative tendencies that emerged in the 1990s, and that many of the practices Putin has adopted were actually developed and perfected during the Yeltsin years. In this way, he created a vision of the 1990s that was more palatable to the majority. He wrote: ‘I hate Yeltsin and ‘Tanya and Valya’ [his daughter Tatiana and her husband Valentin Yumashev], Chubais and the rest of the corrupt family [lt]…[gt] I hate the swindlers we used to call reformers for some reason. Now it is clear as day that they cared about nothing but scheming and their own personal welfare’.

This negative view of the 1990s is far more widespread in Russia than Sergei Medvedev’s optimistic vision of a ‘decade of freedom’. What Navalny has done, however, is to show that Putinism is not a cure for all the ills of the 1990s, as the Kremlin portrays it, but rather a continuation of the disease. In short, Putinism is part and parcel of Yeltsinism. This analysis and political vision could potentially create a far broader opposition coalition than the one that exists today. The ACF and Maria Pevchikh seized on Navalny’s ideas, developing his manifesto into a documentary series. The full consequences of this new intervention are yet to be seen; however, the initial reactions show both the promise and the limitations of the ACF’s approach.

YELTSIN, THE TEACHER; PUTIN, THE PUPIL

One of the achievements of Navalny’s manifesto and Pevchikh’s series is that the ideas widely considered uncontroversial in the academic community are finally making inroads in the Russian opposition movement. This alone proves that such a discussion has long been overdue. For example, both Navalny and Pevchikh focus on corruption as a fertile soil for authoritarianism. Pevchikh’s videos in particular show how authoritarian tendencies emerged in the 1990s as a result of the collusion between the political and the economic elites, with the oligarchs propping up Yeltsin politically in return for the state’s most prized assets.

A key moment in this collusion was the 1996 presidential election, in which the power of oligarchic media and financial resources was used to give Yeltsin an unfair advantage. Pevchikh articulates this point very clearly in the second part of the series, shedding light on the connection between Yeltsin and Putin’s electoral manipulation. Political scientists fully concur with her on this point. For example, Henry Hale, a professor at George Washington University, wrote back in 2010: ‘The mechanism that Yeltsin created and first mobilized to win reelection in 1996 was, at root, essentially the same mechanism that Putin developed in the 2000s to create the political system we have today’.

The logic of patronage – securing political loyalty in exchange for material benefits – permeates both the Yeltsin and Putin periods. Overall, the post-Soviet era was a time of boundless greed and cynicism of the elites who would sell their own country multiple times over for the luxuries that they dreamed of but could not get their hands on in the Soviet times. Pevchikh’s focus on corruption certainly helps to highlight this part of Russia’s recent history, showing that there was indeed no sharp break between the 1990s and the Putin years. This is a productive move that pierces both the ‘wild nineties’ and the ‘decade of freedom’ myths.

However, the single-minded focus on corruption in the series is also somewhat limiting. Certain key events – most notably, the 1993 shelling of the parliament and the subsequent adoption of the constitution that is highly unbalanced in favor of the presidency – are entirely omitted from the narrative, most likely because they do not lend themselves easily to the corruption-based explanation. This is unfortunate because the shelling of the parliament and the ‘monarchical’ constitution are mentioned in Navalny’s original manifesto. His text offers a broad discussion of the decade, with multiple themes present.

Pevchikh’s series, on the other hand, is structured like a typical ACF investigation, focusing on specific people, facts and evidence, with corruption as the overarching theme. Herein lies the contradiction: discussing the past requires some generalizations and broader political/ideological statements. Pevchikh seems to invite such a discussion, but does not make its own full-fledged argument in it, as if saying: ‘I only present the facts, you draw your own conclusions’. The confused and negative reactions to the show are partly due to its own evasions and half-silences. And yet, Pevchikh’s effort can only be applauded for the very fact that the discussion of the 1990s has finally begun in the opposition circles. The series has its flaws, but it is the first of its kind.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Pevchikh’s show had some immediate effects in the public sphere and opposition politics. On the one hand, some of the reactions (e.g., YouTube comments) hint at the possibility of a broader coalition that I discussed earlier. Older people, with their long-held negative views of the 1990s, became more sympathetic to the ACF and the anti-regime cause more generally. Young people found the videos enlightening and educational. Many liberal opinion leaders, however, had a visceral reaction to the show – if anything, for the simple fact that they took part in the show’s events and, in some cases, were personally mentioned in the videos. Some liberal-minded members of the opposition disliked the show because they were not ready to part ways with the ‘decade of freedom’ myth. After all, a myth is not a logical construction: it has emotional valence, and those who remember the 1990s for ‘the feeling of unbearable happiness, of a vast world, of endless choices’, as Sergei Medvedev put it, could feel personally attacked by Pevchikh’s relentless criticism of the decade.

The full impact of the show is yet to be seen, but the problem remains that Pevchikh’s videos were released in a context of extreme repression in Russia, when dissidence of any kind is immediately crushed with the full force of the state. The opposition’s turn to introspection is partly involuntary. When all avenues for political participation are closed, one of the last remaining activities is to reflect on the perennial questions: When did it all go so horribly wrong? How do we not repeat the same mistakes again? I do not believe that such reflection is fruitless. If anything, the topic of the 1990s has been demanding it for quite some time. Nevertheless, the end result of this reflection should be new approaches, messaging, demands and coalitions. I hope that the ACF will be able to maintain its leadership role, but the task should not fall on their shoulders alone: all of us in the opposition movement need to step up our game.