The promise Putin made to Russia – and broke

When Vladimir Putin launched his bid to be elected as Russia’s president in 2000, he had already been in the role for a month and a half. His predecessor Boris Yeltsin had stepped down on 31 December 1999, appointing his young prime minister in his place to prevent political opponents from prosecuting him and his associates – on well-founded grounds – for corruption. At the time, less than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, Russia had fair elections, freedom of expression, a thriving press and a growing economy. A quarter of a century on, all of that has gone.

Today marks exactly 25 years since Putin was elected President of Russia for the first time. Publishing his manifesto in the form of an open letter to the Russian public, he wrote in February 2000: ‘If I were to look for a slogan for my election campaign, it would be very simple. It would be “A decent life”.’ 

Putin’s policy platform was vague, with few concrete pledges beside fighting poverty, cracking down on crime, rejuvinating the economy and restoring the ‘dignity’ of Russia on the world stage. Nevertheless, some of his declarations stand out – not least because, at a distance of 25 years, they highlight with jawdropping irony just how far Putin has dragged the country into the gutter in that time. 

Describing the 2000 election as a ‘great historic chance to build a Russia’ that could be passed on to future generations without shame, Putin challenged his critics: ‘Those who claim that we will use this chance to establish a dictatorship are engaged in scaremongering.’ ‘Our press today is free and it will forever be free,’ he wrote. 

Hindsight, of course, is a great thing. Many politicians and diplomats who have dealt with Putin over the past quarter century have often spoken about how, in the early years of his rule, they were convinced that he was sincere in his desire to align Russia closer with the West. And yet, the warning signs were there from the start.

In his election manifesto, he acknowledged the fall of the Soviet Union and how it had left Russia a shadow of its former self. But no more: ‘True, Russia has ceased to be an empire, but it has not wasted its potential as a great power.’ Another of his policies, set out so vaguely, was to ‘pursue our foreign policy in keeping with our national interests’. 

On this last point in particular, the Russian President has stuck to his word with devastating consequences. Moscow is now three years into a full-scale conflict in Ukraine that Putin, in a failed attempt to bring Kyiv into his sphere of influence – the so-called Russkiy Mir, had been told would take three days. Before that came the invasion of Crimea in 2014, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the second Chechen war that dominated the early noughties. Putin has left a bloody trail in his wake – all in the name of restoring Russia as a ‘great power’.

More successfully, in 2020 Putin helped Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko crush a series of mass protests in the wake of fraudulent elections manipulated in his favour. In return, Lukashenko brought Belarus further into Russia’s orbit, even allowing Putin’s troops to use the country as a launch pad for their initial invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Former Soviet countries such as Slovakia, Hungary and even Georgia have all acquired Russia-friendly governments in recent years, in large part thanks to the Kremlin’s seductive offers of cheap energy and other financial benefits fielty to Putin can bring. 

Putin won that first election with 52 per cent of the vote. For many years, his promise of a ‘decent life’ underpinned the unspoken contract the president had established with the Russian public. He would deliver that for them, as long as they didn’t question him – or his increasingly authoritarian leadership style – too much. 

It is thanks to this social contract that, before 2022, there had been relatively little mass resistance to Putin in Russia over the years. Civil liberties and rights have, in that time, been thoroughly eroded. Now, with casualties on the Ukrainian front line averaging 1,200 a day, and inflation growing, the country is in the grip of a demographic and economic crisis.

With the start of the Ukraine war, freedom of expression was fully extinguished: the crime of spreading so-called ‘fake news’ about the Russian army is punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. There is no free media operating in the country. According to the human rights organisation OVD Info, over 20,000 Russians have been detained since February 2022 for expressing opposition to the conflict. There are over 1,500 political prisoners in the country; the most high profile of Putin’s critics are either dead (Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkova, Alexei Navalny) or in exile abroad (Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Mikhail Khodorkovsky).

Throughout his rule, Putin has consistently presented himself as the model strongman. And yet, a curious chink in his armour remains. When it comes to actually dealing with a true crisis, the Russian President simply can’t handle it.

Russians didn’t have to wait long to experience this for the first time. The Kursk submarine disaster in August 2000, mere months into his first term, saw Putin flail. Preferring to let the navy take the heat from distraught and increasingly angry relatives, he rejected and then hindered Western offers of help in the rescue mission lest any other country get a glimpse of Russian naval technology. All 118 submariners on the vessel died. The onset of the Covid pandemic, multiple terror attacks on Russian soil and the Wagner mercenary leader Evgeniy Prigozhin’s coup in June 2023 have cemented this pattern of behaviour.

At the age of 72, Putin is now as strong as he has ever been during his 25 years in the Kremlin. He has ruled nearly as long as Joseph Stalin; if he lives until the end of his seventh term as president, he will have out-ruled the Empress Catherine the Great. He has no named successor: to appoint one would invite his allies and rivals to start imagining what life after his death could be like. The willingness of US President Donald Trump to bring him in from the cold and indulge his demands for Ukrainian capitulations in so-called ‘peace negotiations’ are making him more powerful still.

No one knows when the end of Putinism will come. But it is safe to assume that, when the time arrives, he won’t quit the Kremlin out of choice. And, when it does, will many Russians still believe that Putin gave them that ‘decent life’ he promised? I doubt it.