This article was originally published on the author’s Substack “Sic Transition Gloria.”
There’s little reward for being right when few care what you say and you’ve mistimed the market of ideas. Much of the 2010s for us suffering Russianists was lost to Washington parlor games about a Russia resurgent.
Yet amid all that static, Russia’s decline began precisely during its boom years, hastened then by its mistakes recovering from the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-2009. It’s worth revisiting this genealogy now that the failures of the war on Ukraine since 2022 have, finally, buried talk of resurgence and replaced it with the dawning realization that Ukraine has swallowed Russia’s capacity to preserve its imperial pretenses in its so-called Near Abroad.
By no means the end of the road for Russia’s influence, the war seals a qualitative decline of Moscow’s power that cannot be denied, nor arrested without radical changes to its political economy. This decline follows from over twenty years of short-sighted, misguided, or counter-productive policies, the bill for which has now come due.
Tempting as it is to consider an alternative history of the 1990s, one where the Clinton administration and Western Europe forged a consensus to offer more aid to rebuild Russia and the broader region, doing so was impossible. Not only were there too few reliable institutions to call upon and the policy prescriptions adopted by Russia’s liberal reformers did not map onto their public’s preferences.
