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Vladimir Putin's 1999 Vision for Russia

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On the last day of 1999, Boris Yeltsin stepped down as president and left Vladimir Putin to govern in his place before the presidential elections in March 2000. The day before Yeltsin announced his retirement, Putin published what can be seen as his first public mission statement as Acting President, "Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.” Ironically, the essay appeared in Nezavisimaya gazeta, then owned by Boris Berezovsky, one of the oligarchs who would suffer most under the consolidation of state power that this essay announced.

The essay announces the soon-to-be-Acting President as a supporter of the 1990s market reforms that had brought Russia into the post-industrial age. The reforms had been rocky, he admits, but inevitable. Writing like a convinced neoliberal, Putin even plagiarizes Margaret Thatcher, writing, “Despite all the difficulties and failures, we have joined the main path along which all of humanity is moving. Only this path, as convincingly witnessed globally, offers the real possibility of dynamic economic growth and improvements to living standards. There is no alternative.” For Putin, Russia’s previous century, and especially its last decade, carry important lessons. Communist ideology, Putin writes, did not work. There is no appetite left for revolution. Any further reforms must be carried out as “evolutionary, gradual, balanced” changes.

Nonetheless, Putin’s acceptance of the neoliberal global consensus goes only so far. “The mechanical copying of other countries will not bring success,” he writes. Building economic growth “is not simply an economic problem. It is also a political problem, and I’m not afraid to say that it’s also an ideological problem. Or even better, a problem of ideals, spirituality, morality.” What Russia needs in order to emerge from its economic slump is a Russian idea composed of “patriotism,” “sovereignty” (derzhavnost’), “statehood” (gosudarstvennichestvo), and “social solidarity.” From these “traditional values” of the Russian people, “a new Russian idea will be born like an alloy, like an organic unification of universal human values and the deeply Russian values that have stood the test of time.”

At the heart of these values is a strong central government, which, Putin writes, Russia needs especially at this moment. Capitalism in the 1990s, he claims, has shown that even the best economic and social policies can fail upon implementation when the central government is weak. Putin’s neoliberalism, then, would be more interventionist. He offered a simple principle: “The state will be there just as much as it is needed; freedom will be there just as much as it is needed.” If this statement sounds eerily Stalinist given subsequent events, it’s perhaps worth considering that it accurately, if baldly, states the central tenet of neoliberalism. What determines whether freedom or the state is “needed,” for both Putin in this essay and for neoliberal economics, is economic growth. That the same statement might be backfilled later with more sinister content shows as much the weakness of neoliberalism as it reveals the long-term planning of Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, several passages from the essay, if pasted on a placard or posted online after 24 February 2022, would expose the author to a prison sentence in Russia. “I am against the resurrection in Russia of state or official ideology in any form,” writes Putin in 1999. “In a democratic Russia, there should not be any enforced civic agreement. All public opinion can only be voluntary.” And later: “history clearly shows that all dictatorships, all authoritarian systems of power are short-lived. Only democratic systems survive.”