The Revolution is Over, Forget It: To the 30th Anniversary of the Russian Federation

Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Политология. 2021. Vol. 23. No. 4. P. 545–559.

Nisnevich Y. A.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the power in post-Soviet Russia was seized by the leaders of the democratic movement – “first wave democrats”, and the more progressive Soviet nomenclature. As a result of the miscalculations made by the leaders of the democratic movement, the representatives of the Soviet nomenclature soon started displacing the “first wave democrats” and the reformers of the “Gaidar call” from the Russian governmental bodies in order to gain full control over the governance in the country. This appeared to be a manifestation of the more general and fundamental process, where the Russian nomenclature separated from the democratic movement, emerging as a new ruling stratum – the immediate heir to the Soviet nomenclature. The turning point, which accelerated the separation and the retreat of the Russian nomenclature from liberal and democratic principles of the country’s modernization, was the beginning of the Chechen tragedy in 1994. Not only did the Chechen events separate the Russian nomenclature and the democratic movement but also split the democratic movement itself. The goal of the article is to examine the transformation of the relationship between the democratic movement and the soviet and, later on, Russian nomenclature during the revolutionary changes of the early 1990s.

Keywords: постсоветская Россия, номенклатура, nomenclature, демократическое движение, post-Soviet Russia, revolutionary transformations, democratic movement, Chechen fault, революционные трансформации, чеченская трагедия