SUMMARY
End of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was established in 1922 after the 1917 Revolution and a subsequent intra-state conflict. It was governed by an authoritarian regime with the Russian Communist Party (CPSU) as the locus of power. Although the republics that constituted the Soviet Union had local governments, they primarily put into power the decisions made in the capital Moscow. Apart from a regular army, the government of the Soviet Union maintained a special police force, the OMON, which was used as riot police as well as in paramilitary operations. The OMON, called 'black berets' after their uniform, answered to the local authorities.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the CPSU and initiated the first modest attempts to democratize the political system. He remained in power until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The First President of the Russian Federation, 1991-1999
The Russian Federation is a successor state of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union consisted of a number of republics, with the Republic of Russia being the largest. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, a new state, the Russian Federation, was established. It consisted of the former Republic of Russia and a number of the former autonomous republics of the Soviet Union. Among these were Chechnya, which would soon launch its its own bid for independence in the first Chechen War
The former president of the Republic of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was elected president of the Russian Federation in the first direct and popular elections in June 1991. He rose to power based on his popularity as one of few high ranking Soviet officials (he was a member of the Politburo) to have publicly criticized the system, becoming a hero for the anti-communist opposition. He was also widely acclaimed for having led the popular resistance to the 1991 coup attempt by Soviet hardliners against Gorbachev. A severe economic crisis, corruption, as well as several political crises, including the 1993 October Coup, caused his popularity to plummet during his first term. His 1996 re-election was reportedly marred by widespread fraud. He was in power until 1999 when he resigned, handing power to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin.
Putin regime, 1999-
Putin had seen a lightning political career, having first entered national politics in 1996. A year later he was appointed the director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yeltsin assigned him prime minister in 1999, and named him acting president the same year. Putin easily won the 2000 election, capitalizing on his strongman persona gained from his handling of the 1999 apartment bombings, blamed on Chechen separatists, which led him to launch the Second Chechen War in August 1999. He similarly easily won the 2004 presidential elections, having been credited with stabilizing the Russian economy after the crisis it experienced following the collapse of the Soviet system and the wave of privatization that empowered the first Russian oligarchs. Putin's popularity was further boosted through his (selective) crackdown on some of Russia's oligarchs, notably the outspoken and Putin-critical Mikhail Khodorkovsky, often using extra-legal measures to seize and redistribute their property to political allies. Putin has widely been accused of cultivating a cult of personality, and has turned Russia increasingly authoritarian.
The Russian constitution hindered Putin from serving a third consecutive term as president. Putin instead held the position of prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev 2008-2012, during which a constitutional reform was passed which extended future presidential terms from four to six years and would allow Putin to once again seek the presidency. Putin returned to the presidency following the elections in 2012, and was re-elected in 2018. A constitutional change in 2020 made it possible for him to run for two more six-year terms, and he was re-elected again in the 2024 elections. While Putin has long been perceived as being genuinely popular inside of Russia, the gradual clamp down on independent media, polling, freedom of expression and fair elections have made this proposition impossible to verify in later years. Genuine opposition inside of Russia has become increasingly difficult, with trumped up charges often resulting in long prison sentences for Putin's opponents. Several outspoken critics of Putin has also been assassinated, notably the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 and opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison in 2024.
Russia under Putin has been involved in many armed conflicts, starting in 1999 with the Chechen Wars and subsequent conflicts over the Caucasus Emirate and Islamic State in the Caucasus. Russia was the driving force against Georgia in the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, acting as a secondary warring party to the breakaway republic. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and fomented and supported pro-Russian separatist movements there between 2014-2022, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As a result of the war in Ukraine, the Putin government was challenged by several groups in a conflict over government in 2023, with the most serious being the Wagner coup attempt. Russia has also been a secondary warring party in Mali and Central African Republic since 2024, and supported the authoritarian leaders Belarus and Kazakhstan to crackdown on protests in 2020 and 2022 respectively. Russia has under Putin been involved in widespread one-sided violence both during the Chechen Wars and during the war in Ukraine .
The Government of Russia has been involved in the interstate, intrastate and one-sided violence categories of UCDP organised violence.
