Winter Is Coming

The Death of Democracy

Russian democracy is all but dead. Vladimir Putin killed it with his totalitarian tendencies, and Western leaders have been unwilling to intervene. For a few years after the 1991 fall of Soviet communism, Russia was a messy but promising experiment in democracy. In 2000, Putin ascended to the presidency. From that perch, the former KGB agent undermined fair elections, corrupted the independent judiciary, co-opted the independent media, stole the assets of oligarchs who defied him, and killed hundreds of people in hostage situations in 2002 and 2004.

In 2008, Putin gave up the presidency after reaching his constitutional limit of two four-year terms. He took the role of prime minister and stripped any semblance of democracy from Russian society. In 2013, forces that Putin controlled brutalized peaceful protesters, and judges sentenced some of them to long prison terms. In 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine and snatched Crimea. Incredibly, these affronts met with barely a whimper from leaders of Western democracies.

Just as you don’t lose a chess match in one ill-fated move, Russian democracy didn’t die in a single blow. It slowly bled out after...