3. The wild nineties
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The 1990s signified a period of widespread social instability for many former Soviet citizens due to the transition to both a new political and economic system. It is referred to as the "wild nineties" (лихие девяностые), a term which has a negative [1]connotation. After the 1991 coup another violent political event took place as a constitutional crisis in 1993 which ended violently with an attack on Moscow's house of Soviets and led to a presidential rule by decree system. In this decade also two Chechen wars took place. The rapid shift from a command economy to market capitalism led to devaluation of citizens' savings, unpaid wages, pensions and social benefits. We will discuss the economic transition in more detail in blog post 5 of this series.
The events of this decade negatively affected inhabitants of the former Soviet Union and attitudes towards western values and the concept of democracy. An overwhelming majority of Russians associate the word democracy with theft, corruption and national humiliation. This emotional rejection created a fertile ground for new active measure campaigns to take root - and provide the groundwork for the return to an authoritarian regime.
Although less present, the soviet intelligence services did not cease their activities employing active measures. Although the American and Soviet secret services agreed to dismantle Service A in the early 1990s[2], they simply changed its name to the MS unit (мероприятия содействия, meaning means of assistance or facilitation).[3] The unit played into the moods of a society suffering under privatisation and political transformation, the societal mood expressed in popular terms such as demokratura (a portmanteau of democracy and dictatorship), prikhvatizatsia (portmanteau of privatization and grabbing) and dermokratia (literally the rule of crap).[4] In doing so the special services prepared their own return to power, by building up Russian society's need for a super-power state with strong leadership. During Putin's presidential campaign the term wild nineties was often contrasted with the term "stable noughties" to signify Putin's repeated statements about stability as the new course of Russian state policy.
One effect of this activity by Russian security services is the increase of political importance of the siloviki. These were mostly KGB People who found their way into politics. Although mostly associated with Putin - see Catherine Belton's book Putin's People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West[5]- the siloviki were already on the rise in the mid-1990s. The KGB was disbanded in 1991; several successor agencies followed until the Federal Counterintelligence servers was renamed to the FSB (Федеральная служба безопасности, Federal Security Service) in 1995 in an effort to detach themselves from the negative associations of the Soviet secret service. For a year, Putin was the director of this agency. The siloviki and their active measures remained in the background for the opportune moment, which presented itself during the financial crisis of 1998 (see blog 5 for more on this crisis). What matters here is the political aftershock of this event. It became painfully clear how little authority Yeltsin had left. In this climate the president turned to men whose authority rested not on economic progress, but on their security service backgrounds. In succession, Yevgeny Primakov, Sergei Stepashin and eventually mister Putin himself became prime minster, all three of them from the intelligence community.
By 1999, the Yeltsin "Family", the president's inner circle of relatives and allied oligarchs, found itself under attack: Prosecutor General Skuratov opened a corruption investigation into Yeltsin and his daughters over alleged kickbacks by the Swiss firm Mabetex. It was the final straw for an ailing and unpopular president, whi just started searching for a trustworthy successor. Putin, then head of the FSB, moved to contain the threat by orchestrating the release of a compromising videotape[6] that discredited and ultimately ended Skuratovs investigation. A modern day use of kompromat by the book. It gained Putin Yeltsin's trust as a man who understood how the tools of the old services could be used to protect those in power. Putin was named prime minister of the Russian Federation afterwards, and supported by the Yeltsin family in running for president in 2000. For Putin's people, the crisis confirmed what they had believed all along: that a statewhich entrusted its fate to markets and Western advice would eventually need men who new how to restore order.
Imagine you are still that former Soviet Citizen from blog post 2, but now you live in the 1990s. The state that provided your pension is gone. You had some money stored in your mattress, but it is worthless now. You see young people drive around in cars of makes you do not know. Your grandson has been sent to fight a war in a defiant republic far away from which he never returned. Your daughter travelled to the war zone to try and find him between the wounded soldiers. They fight a war for a state that does not seem to care about them. Democracy means treason to you. Wouldn't you long for a strong state with a strong leader to take care of you?
Threatened, then threatening
During Putin's early years as Russian president hopes of finding a modus vivendi with the West quickly evaporated due to unrealistic expectations and mutual distrust. A significant part of the deterioration of the relationship was disagreement about NATO-expansion, which amplified the Russian feeling of being betrayed by the west. The distrust also was a result of the failed promise that market democratization would lead to welfare and respect in Russian society. A restoration of Russian foreign intelligence agencies took place and active measures were no longer limited to the post-Soviet "near abroad" on which they focused in the wild 1990s. They became part of Moscow's strategic culture.
Under Putin, the Kremlin and Security Community has embraced a sense that Russia faces an omnipresent threat from the West and that active measures are the most logical response.[7] However, NATO's Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense and the risks of directly challenging a richer West precluded directly confronting NATO memeber states, though Russia repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use force against non-NATO neighbours (Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, leading to the full-scale invasion of 2022).
Active measures make use of Russian strengths and perceived western weaknesses such as freedom of speech and open politics. In Russia this means employing their scale of intelligence networks (as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, some 25 million ethnic Russians are spread across the Soviet diaspora), centralized propaganda institutions and highly skilled former Soviet engineers without any economic perspective. It is in this context that Russian hacker culture has become a specific strength in Russia's strategic culture. We will take a closer look at the development of Russia's technical intelligentsia into "violent enterpreneurs" during the 90s and 00s in the next few blog posts.
Notes and references
Active measures. (2026). Retrieved August 12, 2026 from Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Active_measures&oldid=1361515725 ↩︎
Soldatov, A., & Borogan, I. (2022, March 6). SVR: Smena imidzha [SVR: A change of image]. Agentura.ru. https://agentura.ru/investigations/svr-smena-imidzha/↩︎
Darczewska, J., & Żochowski, P. (2017). Active measures: Russia's key export (Point of View No. 64). Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich (Centre for Eastern Studies). (p. 28) Retrieved August 12, 2026 from https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/point-view/2017-05-30/active-measures-russias-key-export↩︎
Der'mokratiya. (n.d.). Tsiklopediya. (n.d.). Retrieved August 12, 2026, from https://cyclowiki.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%8F↩︎
Belton, C. (2020). Putin’s people: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.↩︎
As Belton describes: "The grainy footage of the rotund prosecutor general cavorting naked on a bed with what appeared to be two prostitutes made for grim viewing." Belton, 2020, p. 127↩︎
Galeotti, M. (2019, June). Active measures: Russia's covert geopolitical operations (Security Insights No. 31). George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. https://www.marshallcenter.org/en/publications/security-insights/active-measures-russias-covert-geopolitical-operations-0
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