For Russians, It’s the Wild 1990s All Over Again

A common feature at cemeteries outside many midsize Russian cities and towns is a separate necropolis of headstones bearing the names of (mostly) young men who perished sometime between 1991 and 2000. They died during the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—victims of crime and violence, mainly, but also of disease, alcoholism, and drug abuse. While these graveyards and the wave of death they represent are the subject of morbid fascination for the rest of the world, in Russia itself they are reminders of an era of national disgrace and humiliation, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned on many occasions. The idea that Putin pulled Russia out of that era is one of his most consistent political campaign messages; his official website, kremlin.ru, contains dozens of derogatory remarks about the chaotic 1990s in Russia. They regularly feature in his state of the union speeches, annual press conferences, and interviews.

A common feature at cemeteries outside many midsize Russian cities and towns is a separate necropolis of headstones bearing the names of (mostly) young men who perished sometime between 1991 and 2000. They died during the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—victims of crime and violence, mainly, but also of disease, alcoholism, and drug abuse. While these graveyards and the wave of death they represent are the subject of morbid fascination for the rest of the world, in Russia itself they are reminders of an era of national disgrace and humiliation, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned on many occasions. The idea that Putin pulled Russia out of that era is one of his most consistent political campaign messages; his official website, kremlin.ru, contains dozens of derogatory remarks about the chaotic 1990s in Russia. They regularly feature in his state of the union speeches, annual press conferences, and interviews.

Putin’s assumption of power on Dec. 31, 1999, bookended a decade which indeed contained many elements of collapsing statehood. Amid general destitution and growing inequality, criminal anarchy, shootouts between rival gangs, and revenge bombings were a regular occurrence. Life expectancy for Russian men rapidly sank. These and other factors, including mass emigration, contributed to a period of unprecedented demographic decline: Each year between 1994 and 2008, Russia’s population decreased by several hundred thousand people, reaching the nadir of almost 1 million in 2000, Putin first full year in power.

Today, there are fresh graveyard lots across Russia, some covering an area as large as several football fields. Instead of a few kitschy mausoleums, there are dozens and often hundreds of fresh mounds of earth with simple, identical crosses bearing men’s names. Their years of death are the same: 2022 and 2023. Some of them were born in 2000 or later, in the early years of Putin’s reign. The fatality numbers are astonishing: By even the most conservative estimates, in a single year of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has already lost more men than in the 10-year Soviet-Afghan War and First Chechen War—combined.

The preponderance of death made visible at the country’s cemeteries isn’t the only way Russia is returning to the 1990s. Today’s Russians once again struggle with growing violence, economic instability, and a flood of mentally and physically broken veterans. They once again face a failed war, broken society, and national humiliation. For a leader whose signature claim to power has been the banishment of 1990s-era chaos in Russia—for which the loss of political freedom, in his supporters’ eyes, was a small price to pay—the return of the 1990s could well become a threat to his rule.

Some of the deaths on display at graveyards across Russia won’t be mourned by many people. Those recruited by the Wagner Group from prisons where they were serving sentences for anything from minor narcotics-related offenses to the most depraved murders are seen as politically irrelevant and thus expendable. Most of them have already been written off by society: young men from very poor or broken families, driven to low-key drug dealing and petty theft to sponsor an addiction, or orphans brutalized by Russia’s system of orphanages and foster care.

Those soldiers who have managed to return home alive—and their families—aren’t faring much better. Already, Russian authorities are struggling to take care of at least 750,000 veterans who have served in Ukraine, according to a leaked document from a charity led by a relative of Putin. This number, too, tops the total for Moscow’s most catastrophic and humiliating military defeats of the past 40 years: the Afghan campaign and the First Chechen War. In both, Soviet and then Russian armies were met with fierce resistance from locals who did not want to be conquered, and civilians bore the brunt of brutal retributions. Before the atrocities perpetrated by Russian soldiers in Bucha, Ukraine, there was the mass murder of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya, in 1995. Before that, there were many massacres committed by Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The Kremlin deployed around 600,000 soldiers to the two wars, and many of those who returned were physically and spiritually broken, conditioned to extreme violence, and prone to bouts of depression and suicide. Some found no place for themselves in civilian society and joined one of the many numerous organized crime groups of the early 1990s.

A similar wave is already bubbling up in Russia today. Every day, there are reports about Ukraine veterans engaged in violence—randomly attacking passersby, stabbing their wife to death in a drunken frenzy in front of their children, or other crimes. Others didn’t need a war to be introduced to wanton criminality: Some of Wagner’s most notorious outlaws, convicted for murders and mutilations of incomprehensible cruelty, have been released back into society as the promised reward for shooting Ukrainians, and a few have almost immediately gone on new killing rampages. Just like in the 1990s, there seems to be no plan for any psychological support for soldiers returning from an active war zone. Just like back then, they are mostly left to their own devices. A flood of firearms allegedly being smuggled from Ukraine back to Russia by returning troops isn’t helping to curb outbursts of spontaneous violence.

Many of the contract soldiers and the recently mobilized who perished in Ukraine were fathers and their family’s sole breadwinners, whose sudden, tragic disappearance leaves a gaping hole in the fabric of society. As the 1990s aptly demonstrated, the decline doesn’t stop with the deceased; as families are torn apart, the war’s wounds already transcend generations. Just like social, demographic, and economic decline begot each other in the 1990s, today’s Russian economy suffers, too, as its most active subjects perish en masse due to the war and its attendant socioeconomic factors. Male life expectancy has taken a hit, and the instability discourages childbirth.

Russian men of the generation currently being wiped out in Ukraine were born at the bottom of the previous demographic dip, when Russia’s fertility rate was at its lowest in many decades. Less than one year before the invasion, the demographers at the Russian Economic Development Ministry were already predicting the loss of more than 1.7 million people over four years. Today, the situation looks even grimmer. While Russian officials downplay it as merely “concerning,” independent demographers call it a “catastrophe,” predicting a return next year to a low in the fertility rate not seen since World War II.

Even before the invasion, Russia’s atrocious handling of the COVID-19 pandemic guaranteed that pandemic-era mortality already surpassed the worst demographic dip of the 1990s—the era of chaos instrumentalized by Putin to justify his rule. Add the devastating effects of the war, and Russia is already looking worse than the “wild” decade in many key areas. Except the 1990s, so consistently demonized by Putin, were also a time of great hope and political freedom unseen by many generations before. The Russian State Duma was a place of genuine political debate. A variety of national media mercilessly attacked the government and exposed the horrors of Russia’s wars; there was an explosion of uncensored art. All of these positive sides of the 1990s would be incomprehensible to an 18-year-old coming of age around 2020—when most civil liberties were already wiped out—just to be drafted into the army and killed in Ukraine in 2022.

This is one of many of Putin’s broken promises to Russians. Gone is the social contract between the Kremlin and Russia’s emerging middle class, which traded political participation for social and economic “stability.” Time and time again, Putin invoked the excesses of the 1990s and promised to lead Russians to a better future; instead, he is dragging them toward an unprecedented decline. His newest promise is to “return” Russia’s “historic lands”—but there are simply fewer and fewer Russians to populate them. And fresh grave lots keep growing by the day.