With Vladimir Putin hitting a quarter-century long tenure as president or prime minister of Russia amidst his ongoing invasion of Ukraine, many outside observers are watching with hopeful eyes, waiting for the day the country sees a long-awaited democratic turn bestowing constitutional rights most in the liberal Western world can enjoy daily. What many may overlook, however, is Russia’s past experiments concerning democracy and liberalism, which only came to pass decades after much of the world had done so. Though history may sometimes be confusing to grasp, it’s important to keep in mind that often, part of understanding the politics of the present is in understanding the politics of the past. That is the case with why democracy in Russia just hasn’t taken off as people had wanted.

Russia’s culture of autocracy had been well entrenched for centuries by the 1900s, when liberal constitutional republics were the norm around the world. With the First World War putting a major strain on resources, the February Revolution of 1917 broke out, which saw the monarchy abolished and replaced by a democratic, generally liberal minded government that sought to expand constitutional freedoms and civil liberties to the people, mostly during the short tenure of Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. However, his time in office could hardly be described as successful. The ongoing First World War nearly set the country on the brink of collapse, resulting in economic ruin and social upheaval that ultimately forced the Prime Minister to flee the country. Succeeding Kerensky’s democratic government was the communist one- party system of the Soviet Union as established by Vladimir Lenin, whose authoritarian system was later exaggerated by Joseph Stalin. Succeeding Stalin was a gradual lessening of political repression, culminating with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of social openness and economic restructuring. After the collapse of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin took office and instituted economic policies known as “shock therapy,” intending to form a new market-based economy by liberalizing prices and privatizing state-owned companies. But this only had the unintended result of increasing inflation and unemployment by extreme amounts. This brings us to Putin, who has been in power for 25 years as of last May, and whose rule has of course been defined as keeping a strong but paranoid grip on his power.

To understand why democracy failed in Russia in both its attempts, it helps to know how people remember those times. It’s had its stints of liberal democracy before, but they can hardly be remembered as successful. Kerensky was unable to break the country out of its economic strain due to many factors, especially depletion of resources during the worst years of World War 1, leading to his fleeing Russia. Yeltsin’s many policies of economic shock therapy unintentionally made inflation and unemployment skyrocket, leading to the people electing Putin and sticking with him for the most part. That isn’t to say the USSR hasn’t been rife with its own economic woes, because it certainly has. But focusing on those that existed during periods of democracy isn’t to cut the USSR any slack. Rather, it’s to point out the fact that in order for For people to accept democracy, it has to be successful first. In some ways, people under some autocratic regimes just like Russia’s might be yearning not just for freedom but also security, or a guarantee that their lives will be easy so long as they keep their head down and mouths shut.

Keeping in mind the need for success in a democratic experiment, another question arises when pondering such trials: “How is it to be undertaken?” Chances are, it’ll look to Western models of liberalism when that time comes, but that presents its own can of worms. Along with Russia’s autocratic culture is a conservative anti-Western culture, so at best a democratic Russia would probably be seen as contradicting that facet of Russian life directly,

and at worst be seen as little more than a puppet of the “American Empire.” Further, how long must Russia wait for people to forget about the economic woes of life under Yeltsin before it can try democracy again? After all, his tenure was only around 30 years ago, and so people still surely remember. But regardless of what these questions mean for a new kind of Russia, one thing remains clear: democracy means little if it doesn’t yield results.