janMar 4, 2025
The end of Soviet economic planning created a violent rush for profitable industries and resources…, quickly creating a new class of wealthy men. Wild privatization was not at all the same thing as a market economy… Markets require the rule of law… Americans, taking the rule of law for granted, could fantasize that markets would create the necessary institutions. This was an error. It mattered whether newly independent states established the rule of law, and above all whether they managed a legal transition of power through free elections.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#oligarchy #russia
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
Yeltsin then used the conflict with parliament as a justification for strengthening the office of the president. In 1996, Yeltsin’s team (by its own account) faked elections that won him another term as president.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#yeltsin #russia
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
By 1999, Yeltsin was visibly ill and frequently intoxicated, and the problem of succession became acute. Elections were needed to replace him; from the perspective of the oligarchs these needed to be managed and the outcome controlled.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#yeltsin #russia
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
Having enriched himself as the assistant to the mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, Putin was known to the Kremlin and thought to be a team player. He had worked for Yeltsin in Moscow since 1998… When appointed Yeltsin’s prime minister in August 1999, Putin was unknown to the larger public, so not a plausible candidate for national elected office. His approval rating stood at 2%. And so it was time to generate a crisis that he could appear to solve.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#yeltsin #putin #russia
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
Thanks to the Second Chechen War, Putin’s approval rating reached 45% in November. In December, Yeltsin announced his resignation and endorsed Putin as his successor. Thanks to unequal television coverage, manipulation of the vote tally, and the atmospherics of terrorism and war, Putin was accorded the absolute majority needed to win the presidential election of March 2000.The ink of political fiction is blood.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#putin #yeltsin #russia
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
So began a new kind of politics, known at the time as “managed democracy,” which Russians would master and later export.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#putin #surkov
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
During Putin’s first two presidential terms, between 2000 and 2008, Surkov exploited manageable conflicts to gain popularity or change institutions. …Surkov (citing Ilyin) claimed that Russians did not yet know how to vote. … Nevertheless, Surkov continued, Russia was superior to other post-Soviet states in its sovereignty. He claimed that none of the non-Russian nations of the old Soviet Union was capable of statehood.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#putin #surkov #ilyin #russia
Show threadjan
In 2004, three former republics of the Soviet Union—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—joined the European Union, along with several other east European states that had been Soviet satellites. In order to join the European Union, these countries had to demonstrate their sovereignty in specific ways that Russia had not: by creating a market that could bear competition, an administration that could implement EU law, and a democracy that held free and fair elections.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#lithuania #latvia #estonia #eu #russia
Mar 4, 2025 at 9:17amWeb
Show threadjanMar 4, 2025
Surkov’s pillars of Russian statehood were “centralization, personification, and idealization”: the state must be unified, its authority granted to an individual, and that individual glorified. Citing Ilyin, Surkov concluded that the Russian people should have as much freedom as they were ready to have. Of course, what Ilyin meant by “freedom” was the freedom of the individual to submerge himself in a collectivity that subjugates itself to a leader.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#surkov #ilyin #putin #russia