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and Belarus from formally dissolving the Soviet Union in December 1991. He
resigned as Soviet president on December 25 and retired to private life.
The 1990s brought the unexpected dissolution of the Soviet Union into its 15
constituent republics. Russia reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation, a
democratic parliamentary republic under the leadership of a popularly elected
president, Boris Yeltsin. The Communist Party was temporarily routed, although
by 1993 it had become an important force in parliament, obstructing Yeltsin's
attempts to dismantle the old state-dominated economy. For average citizens,
the 1990s were a traumatic decade, as the safety network of pensions, health
care, and other social benefits from the Soviet system was dismantled, leaving
them vulnerable to the vagaries of a new economy. This was not the capitalist
market economy that Western advisers had optimistically assumed would take
root in Russia, but rather a “wild capitalism” dominated by a few oligarchs who
were able to take advantage of the opportunities offered in the transition
between one system to another. Yeltsin was reelected president in 1996, but his
increasing poor health quickly led to speculation about his successor. In the fol-
lowing years he played an astute game of politics, shuffling his cabinet, fre-
quently changing prime ministers, until finally settling on Vladimir Putin, a
relatively unknown young bureaucrat with a background in the internal secu-
rity apparatus (KGB). Putin easily won election in 2000 and began the difficult
task of continuing the transition of Russia away from decades of communism.
With Putin as president, the wild ride of the 1990s seemed to be over, and
Russians prepared for a relatively more stable period. Many of the features that
had emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union were still in place. Business
tycoons, or oligarchs as they were known in Russian, continued to control
important segments of the Russian economy, and even though they attempted
to exert political influence as in the Yeltsin years, the Putin government followed
a more selective policy toward them, favoring some while harassing or perse-
cuting others. The Chechen problem continued to fester, draining the nation's
resources and political capital in a bloody war with no apparent immediate solu-
tion. On several occasions Chechens brought the war into Russia through spec-
tacular terrorist acts such as the seizure of a Moscow theater in the fall of 2003.
On the other hand, the Russian economy seemed to find a more firm foot-
ing after the debacle of 1998 and was aided by growing oil revenues. Signs of
greater prosperity were still visible mostly in cities such as Moscow and St.
Petersburg, but the bulk of the country had still not emerged from the spectac-
ular decline that had accompanied the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In inter-
national affairs, Russia continued to chart its own course, no longer the
superpower it had been during the cold war but still a great power claiming
strategic interests beyond its borders. In the summer of 2003, the city of St.
Petersburg, hometown of President Putin and long neglected during Soviet
times, celebrated its 300th anniversary in a grand fashion. As Putin's term came
to an end and the nation prepared for presidential elections in 2004, Russia con-
tinued to move away from the legacy of communism, even if the direction or
final destination of this transition remained unclear.
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