Under Vladimir Putin, Russia kept regular elections, parties and a constitution while the Kremlin recentralised power, took control of national television, disciplined oligarchs, used oil and gas rents to buy stability and progressively narrowed the space for opposition, ending with the 2020 constitutional amendments.
The 1993 Constitution, adopted after Boris Yeltsin's violent confrontation with parliament, created a strong presidency. The 1990s brought a collapse in output, the 1998 default, wars in Chechnya and the rise of business magnates who controlled media and much of industry. Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and head of the FSB, prime minister in August 1999; when Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999 Putin became acting president, and he won the presidential election of March 2000 in the first round.
The formal institutions stayed in place (a directly elected president, a bicameral Federal Assembly, multiparty elections, courts, federalism), but their content changed:
Growth averaged high single digits until 2008, driven by rising oil prices, the recovery from the 1990s and early reforms (a flat 13 percent income tax, land and budget reforms). Peter Rutland's 2008 assessment asked whether the boom was sustainable given its dependence on hydrocarbons. World Bank estimates put total natural-resource rents at 21.5 percent of GDP in 2000 and 19.1 percent in 2008. The state reasserted control over strategic sectors: the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the break-up of Yukos signalled to business owners that property depended on political loyalty, and state companies such as Rosneft and Gazprom expanded. Real GDP per person in constant dollars rose by about 64 percent between 2000 and 2010, then by only about 10 percent to 2020.
Daniel Treisman shows that presidential approval tracked perceptions of the economy, which gave the regime an incentive to deliver growth. When growth stalled and the 2011 election was seen as rigged, the largest protests since the 1990s followed in Moscow. The response combined concessions (restored governors' elections) with new restrictions: the 2012 "foreign agent" law for NGOs, higher fines for unauthorised protests and prosecutions of demonstrators. Timothy Frye argues that the regime faced real limits ("weak strongman"): it needed elite loyalty, popular support and competent officials, and the trade-offs among them constrained what the Kremlin could do.
Repression was selective but grew. Journalists critical of the authorities were killed, including Anna Politkovskaya (2006); the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot near the Kremlin in 2015. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in eastern Ukraine, patriotic mobilisation raised Putin's approval while sanctions followed. In August 2020 the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent; evidence later implicated the FSB. He was arrested on his return in January 2021, his organisations were designated "extremist", and in December 2021 the courts ordered the liquidation of Memorial, the country's oldest human rights organisation.
The amendments, approved by a nationwide vote in 2020 (78 percent yes on a 68 percent turnout, according to the Central Electoral Commission), introduced a strict two-term limit for presidents but exempted the incumbent and former presidents from counting earlier terms, allowing Putin to remain until 2036. The Venice Commission called this an ad hominem amendment and concluded that the package "disproportionately strengthened the position of the President" and did away with some checks and balances.
Restored state authority and, with high oil prices, delivered a decade of fast growth: real GDP per person rose about 64 percent in 2000–2010 before stagnating. Elections continued but were managed through control of television, candidate filtering, administrative pressure and documented fraud. Opposition space narrowed after 2012; the 2020 amendments allowed the incumbent to stay in office until 2036.
The configuration of managed competition ended with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Within weeks the remaining independent media were closed or blocked, wartime censorship laws criminalised criticism of the army, and the regime moved from selective to broad repression, opening the period described in the next experiment.
A field experiment that randomly assigned observers to 156 Moscow polling stations estimated United Russia's true share in the December 2011 Duma election at about 36 percent, at least 11 percentage points below the official 47 percent.[1][2]
The Venice Commission concluded that the 2020 constitutional amendments disproportionately strengthened the Russian presidency and that exempting the current and former presidents from the new two-term limit was an ad hominem amendment.[1]
Putin-era Russia before 2022 is best described as an 'informational autocracy' that relied on controlling information, imitating democratic institutions and selective repression rather than mass violence.[1][2][3][4]
World Bank estimates put Russia's total natural-resource rents at 21.5 percent of GDP in 2000 and 19.1 percent in 2008, falling to 7.6 percent in 2020 before rising again to 18.5 percent in 2021.[1][2]