We asked Angelika Nußberger three questions about the Pivotal Decade of the 1990

1. What were your main experiences of the 1990s, either professionally or personally, as you recall them today?

In the 1990s I was a young researcher fascinated by the profound political transformation of the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. I had been for the first time in Moscow in 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Although everyday life still appeared unmistakably Soviet, it was already possible to sense the first winds of change. In the context of my PhD on Soviet constitutional law during the process of transition I returned very often to Russia in the following years. These visits allowed me to witness first-hand the intense debates on the rule of law, human rights, and democracy, as well as the drafting of the 1993 Russian Constitution.

At the same time, my repeated stays and the friendships I formed with Russian colleagues gave me a close understanding of the hardships people endured during those years. Many academics lost their positions, poverty—and at times even hunger—was widespread, and the political situation remained highly volatile.

Yet despite these difficulties, there was a palpable sense that a new chapter was beginning. I do not believe we were naïve. We were fully aware of the enormous challenges and of the possibility that the reforms might be reversed. Nevertheless, we were fortunate to experience this period of glasnost and perestroika.

2. What do you see as the key point of divergence between the West and Russia as regards how they now view the 1990s as a decade? Have Russian perceptions of that decade shifted since the end of it? If so, how and why?

The divergence between Russian and Western narratives about the 1990s could hardly be greater. One of my closest colleagues, Tamara Morščakova, the former Deputy Chair of the Russian Constitutional Court, recently published her memoirs on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. She explains that one of her principal motivations for writing them was the need to challenge the increasingly negative official portrayal of Russia’s transformation in the 1990s.

Throughout her career, Morščakova fought for judicial independence. In her view, the 1990s were the period in which Russia came closest to establishing a genuinely independent judiciary. Judicial independence, however, is inseparable from a free society. Today, both societal freedom and judicial independence are portrayed by the Russian authorities not as achievements, but as symptoms of disorder and chaos. The 1990s are frequently compared to the Smuta (Time of Troubles), the period at the beginning of the seventeenth century between the end of the Rurik dynasty and the rise of the Romanovs, when foreign intervention, including the occupation of Moscow by Polish forces, symbolized the disintegration of the Russian state.

In my view, the re-establishment of authoritarian rule in Russia after 2000—and especially after 2012—was the result of a deliberate long-term political project. A central element of this project was the reinterpretation of the 1990s. The experience of freedom, human rights, international cooperation and political pluralism had to be recast as a period of humiliation and instability. Without this reversal of historical memory, it would have been far more difficult to secure broad public support for a return to authoritarian rule.

3. What is it about the 1990s that you’d most like to know or understand that you think we don’t today? 

For me, as a lawyer, the central question is why Western constitutional concepts—human rights, the rule of law, and democracy—as well as institutions such as the Constitutional Court, Parliament, and an independent judiciary, ultimately failed to take root in Russia. It is clear that the process of institutional transformation was marked by profound misunderstandings, but also by the abuse of newly created institutions. Judicial immunity, for example, was at times exploited to shield criminal activities, while electoral manipulation took new forms, such as the nomination of candidates with identical names to those of leading contenders in order to divert votes.

It is equally clear that the West made serious mistakes in supporting Russia’s transformation. Advice was often misguided, driven by external interests, or simply insufficiently attentive to Russia’s specific historical, political, and social circumstances. Double standards further undermined the credibility of the Western model. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that everything failed. Some developments were genuinely promising—not least Russia’s remarkable openness to international law in the early 1990s. These achievements, however, gradually disappeared.

Understanding why they failed, and assessing the relative importance of the different factors that contributed to the subsequent dismantling of the legal concepts developed in the early 1990s, remains, in my view, one of the most important challenges for legal scholarship.