Russia

Russia demonstrates how the collapse of one concentrated power system — Soviet state communism — can produce not dispersal of power but reconcentration under new forms. The 1990s privatisation transferred state assets worth hundreds of billions to a handful of insiders, and the subsequent Putin era rebuilt centralised authority through what Russians call the "vertical of power" (vertikal vlasti). The dynamics this site describes globally — concentration of power, capture of institutions, extraction from the many to benefit the few — operate here with unusual clarity. But Russia also carries deep traditions of communal self-organisation, from the village commune to the dacha garden, that have persisted through every regime change.

Power structures

Russia's power system is organised around the presidential "vertical of power" — a centralised chain of command running from the Kremlin through federal districts, regional governors, and municipal administrations. Vladimir Putin has held power as president or prime minister continuously since 1999, making him the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin.^[1]

The current elite structure emerged from the 1990s privatisation era. The 1995 loans-for-shares scheme — in which well-connected bankers acquired major state enterprises at a fraction of their value in exchange for loans to the government — created the original oligarch class. Figures including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, and Vladimir Potanin acquired oil companies, metals conglomerates, and media empires for prices that bore no relation to their market value.^[2]

Under Putin, the oligarch system was restructured rather than dismantled. Khodorkovsky's arrest in 2003 and the seizure of Yukos Oil established the principle: oligarchs could keep their wealth provided they stayed out of politics. Those who complied — Abramovich, Potanin, Alisher Usmanov — retained their positions. Those who challenged — Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky — were exiled or imprisoned. A new class of Putin-era oligarchs emerged, many connected to him through St. Petersburg or the security services.

The siloviki — figures drawn from the security services, military, and law enforcement — form the core of Putin's power base. Former FSB, GRU, and military officials hold positions across government, state corporations, and regional administrations. United Russia, the dominant political party, holds a constitutional supermajority in the State Duma (over two-thirds of seats), functioning less as a party with an ideology than as an administrative apparatus for channelling presidential authority.^[3]

Media control is near-total. The state owns or controls all major television channels — Channel One, Rossiya-1, NTV — which remain the primary news source for most Russians. Independent outlets including Novaya Gazeta, Echo of Moscow, TV Rain (Dozhd), and Meduza have been shut down, designated as "foreign agents," or forced to operate from exile.^[4]

Institutional capture

Russia's energy sector illustrates state-corporate fusion. Gazprom, the world's largest natural gas company, is majority state-owned, and its leadership has served as a pipeline between government and corporate elite — former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev chaired Gazprom's board. Rosneft, the state oil company, absorbed the assets of Yukos after Khodorkovsky's arrest and is run by Igor Sechin, a close Putin associate and former deputy chief of the presidential administration. Together, these companies generate a substantial share of federal revenue and serve as instruments of both domestic patronage and foreign policy.^[5]

The judiciary reliably serves executive interests. Conviction rates in Russian criminal courts exceed 99%, a figure that reflects not efficient prosecution but systemic pressure on judges to convict. The Constitutional Court, which showed flickers of independence in the 1990s, has not ruled against the Kremlin on a significant matter in decades. Courts routinely uphold charges against opposition figures, journalists, and protesters under laws on "extremism," "discrediting the armed forces," and "spreading false information."^[6]

The 2020 constitutional amendments — approved in a nationwide vote criticised by independent observers — reset Putin's presidential term count, potentially allowing him to remain in office until 2036. The amendments also established the primacy of Russian law over international treaty obligations and granted former presidents lifetime immunity from prosecution.^[7]

Elections are managed rather than competitive. Opposition candidates face systematic exclusion through registration requirements, criminal charges, and disqualification. Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation documented vast networks of official corruption — including a widely viewed 2021 investigation of a palace allegedly built for Putin on the Black Sea coast — before Navalny was imprisoned and died in custody in February 2024. Independent election monitors from Golos have documented ballot stuffing, carousel voting, and statistical anomalies across multiple election cycles.^[8]

Housing and cost of living

Russia's housing stock bears the imprint of Soviet central planning. The khrushchyovka — five-storey prefabricated apartment blocks built under Khrushchev in the 1950s and 1960s to address acute housing shortages — still house millions of Russians. Originally designed with a 25-year lifespan, many are now over 60 years old and structurally deteriorating. Moscow's controversial renovation programme (renovatsiya), launched in 2017, plans to demolish roughly 5,000 khrushchyovka buildings and rehouse 1.6 million residents, though critics raise concerns about displacement and developer profit.

The kommunalka (communal apartment), where multiple families shared kitchens and bathrooms, was a defining feature of Soviet urban life. While their numbers have declined sharply, an estimated 100,000 or more remain in St. Petersburg alone, housing some of the city's poorest residents.

Regional inequality in housing costs is extreme. Moscow flat prices on the resale market ranged in August 2026 from about 250,000 rubles per square metre in the outer districts to about 455,000 in the Central okrug (excluding luxury housing), while average monthly wages in most regions outside Moscow and St. Petersburg were roughly 65,000 to 90,000 rubles in 2025, against about 180,000 in Moscow. The gap between Moscow and regional Russia in income, services, and infrastructure is among the starkest urban-rural divides in any major economy. Financial centralisation is extreme: roughly three-quarters of Russian banks' assets are concentrated in Moscow.^[9]

Environmental pressures

Russia holds roughly one-fifth of the world's forests and significant Arctic territory, making its environmental trajectory globally consequential. Arctic drilling by Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, and Novatek — supported by substantial state subsidies — continues to expand despite climate commitments. Russia's permafrost zone, covering roughly 65% of the country's territory, is warming at rates that threaten infrastructure, release methane, and accelerate global feedback loops.^[10]

The 2020 Norilsk diesel oil spill — in which roughly 21,000 tonnes of fuel leaked from a Nornickel power plant storage tank into Arctic rivers — was one of the largest environmental disasters in Russian history. The company initially attempted to conceal the spill. Nornickel was fined 146 billion rubles ($2 billion), the largest environmental fine in Russian history, though enforcement of cleanup obligations has been questioned.^[11]

Siberian forest fires burn millions of hectares annually. In 2021, fires burned an estimated 18.2 million hectares — an area larger than Greece — releasing roughly 970 million tonnes of CO2 between June and August alone. Authorities often decline to fight fires in remote zones classified as "control areas" where suppression is deemed economically unjustifiable. Lake Baikal, holding roughly 20% of the world's unfrozen surface freshwater, faces pollution from the former Baikalsk paper mill, agricultural runoff, tourism development, and the spread of toxic algae (Spirogyra).^[12]

Cooperative and mutual aid traditions

The obshchina (village commune) was the foundational unit of Russian peasant society for centuries, governing land redistribution, collective labour obligations, and local justice. Though formally abolished during collectivisation, its organisational logic — communal decision-making, shared resources, mutual obligation — persisted in collective farms and continues to shape rural social relations.

The artel — a cooperative work association where members pooled labour and shared profits — predates the Soviet period and operated in fishing, construction, mining, and craft production. Artels functioned on principles of collective responsibility and elected leadership, representing a genuinely bottom-up economic form.

Russia's dacha culture represents a distinctive form of household-level food sovereignty. An estimated 40 to 60 million Russians cultivate dacha plots, producing a significant share of the country's potatoes, vegetables, and fruit. During economic crises — the 1998 default, the 2008 recession, post-2014 sanctions — dacha production has served as a genuine survival mechanism, not merely a middle-class hobby. This capacity for self-provisioning, rooted in Soviet-era garden plot allocations, represents a form of resilience that operates entirely outside state and market structures.

During crises — from the 1990s economic collapse to post-2022 sanctions — Russians have reliably turned to informal mutual aid networks: sharing resources, providing housing, and sustaining community through personal networks (svyazi) rather than through formal institutions. This pattern of bypassing the state through horizontal solidarity is a persistent structural feature.

Political language

Sovereign democracy (suverennaya demokratiya)

Term coined by Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov to describe Russia's political system as democratic on its own terms, rejecting Western standards as culturally inappropriate.

Managed democracy (upravlyaemaya demokratiya)

A system that maintains democratic forms — elections, parties, parliament — while controlling outcomes through administrative and media management.

Power vertical (vertikal vlasti)

The centralised chain of command from the presidency through all levels of government — the explicit organising principle of the Russian state.

Near abroad (blizhneye zarubezhye)

Former Soviet republics treated as Russia's natural sphere of influence — the conceptual basis for interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Siloviki

Political figures from the security services (FSB, GRU, military, police) — the dominant faction in Putin's power structure.

Oligarch (oligarkh)

Business figures who acquired state assets during 1990s privatisation and wielded political influence — now applied to Putin-era billionaires whose wealth depends on Kremlin favour.

Colour revolution (tsvetnaya revolyutsiya)

Kremlin framing of popular uprisings in post-Soviet states as Western-orchestrated regime change operations, used to justify domestic crackdowns on civil society.

Foreign agent (inostrannyy agent)

Legal designation applied to NGOs, media outlets, and individuals receiving foreign funding or deemed under "foreign influence" — used to stigmatise and restrict independent organisations.

Denazification (denatsifikatsiya)

Official justification for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, repurposing World War II language to frame the Ukrainian government as a fascist regime requiring forced removal.

Unique structural features

Russia possesses the world's largest nuclear arsenal — roughly 5,580 warheads as of 2024 — and holds a permanent seat with veto power on the United Nations Security Council. These two structural positions give Russia disproportionate influence over global security architecture relative to its economic weight (GDP roughly comparable to Italy or South Korea).^[3]

Energy has functioned as a foreign policy instrument. Russia's natural gas pipeline network — including Nord Stream (now damaged), TurkStream, and Power of Siberia — has created dependencies across Europe and is being redirected toward China. The weaponisation of gas supplies during the 2022 energy crisis demonstrated both the leverage and its limits, as European countries accelerated diversification.

Russia has developed sophisticated information warfare capabilities. The Internet Research Agency (based in St. Petersburg), state media outlets RT and Sputnik, and military intelligence cyber operations represent a coordinated infrastructure for shaping narratives domestically and abroad. The Mueller investigation documented Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and similar operations have been identified across Europe.^[4]

Territorial scale — Russia spans 11 time zones and 17.1 million square kilometres — creates governance challenges that reinforce centralisation. The distance between Moscow and Vladivostok (over 9,000 kilometres) means that regional realities are often invisible to the centre, while the centre's control mechanisms are often nominal in remote regions. Russia's population of roughly 144 million is declining, with a demographic crisis driven by low birth rates, high male mortality (life expectancy for men is roughly 67 years), and emigration.

Legal and constitutional context

The 1993 Constitution was adopted by referendum following Yeltsin's violent dissolution of the Supreme Soviet — tanks shelling the parliament building in October 1993. It established a presidential system with powers that critics describe as "superpresidential": the president appoints the prime minister, can dissolve the Duma, issues binding decrees, and controls foreign policy and the security apparatus. The constitutional design concentrated power in the presidency as a deliberate choice, reflecting the crisis conditions of its creation.^[1]

The Constitutional Court, which under Chief Justice Valery Zorkin challenged Yeltsin's actions in 1993, was subsequently restructured and relocated from Moscow to St. Petersburg. It has functioned as a legitimating body for presidential authority, approving the 2020 amendments and the annexation of Crimea as constitutional. Its rulings on the primacy of Russian law over European Court of Human Rights judgments provided the legal basis for Russia's withdrawal from the Council of Europe in 2022.^[7]

The "foreign agent" law, originally modelled on the US Foreign Agents Registration Act but applied far more broadly, has been expanded repeatedly since 2012. It now covers not only NGOs receiving foreign funding but also media outlets, individual journalists, and anyone deemed under "foreign influence." Designated entities must label all publications with a lengthy disclaimer, face onerous reporting requirements, and carry the Soviet-era stigma of the term. As of 2024, hundreds of organisations and individuals have been designated.^[6]

Laws criminalising "discrediting the armed forces" (up to 15 years imprisonment), "spreading false information" about the military, and "extremism" have been deployed extensively since 2022 to silence anti-war speech. Memorial, Russia's oldest and most prominent human rights organisation — documenting Soviet-era repression since 1989 — was ordered dissolved by the Supreme Court in December 2021.