Soviet leaders had a poor record of keeping their promises. Nikita Khrushchev’s pronouncement that Communism would be fully implemented by 1980, or Mikhail Gorbachev’s pledge to give every family its own apartment by 2000, only provided more fodder for political jokes. Dmitri Medvedev’s assertion, at a meeting with Western Kremlinologists in September 2009, that direct gubernatorial elections will not return “in a hundred years” was of the same order. The replacement of elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees—in a country whose Constitution still purports to be federal—was carried out by Vladimir Putin on the pretext of the “fight against terrorism” after the Beslan school siege in 2004, and was widely considered to be the last stroke in the construction of his authoritarian “power vertical.” In the final years of the Soviet Union, and during the short-lived democracy of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, it was the elected local leaders, with their own power base and legitimacy, who presented the most formidable challenge to the government in Moscow. By abolishing gubernatorial elections, Putin’s regime pursued two goals at once: imposing its top-down control over the country and eliminating the main source of potential opposition.

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