By Joseph Aronesty
If you don’t understand how Vladimir Putin dismantled Russia’s democracy in his first 24 months in office, you won’t understand how democracies erode anywhere — including here at home. What happened in Russia didn’t start with tanks, riots, or a military takeover. It began with paperwork. It began with “reforms.” It began with things that looked technical, boring, maybe even reasonable.
Russia in the 1990s was messy, corrupt, chaotic… but it was a democracy. Elections were real. Governors were elected. The press was noisy and often critical. Independent television networks investigated the Kremlin. Oligarchs funded opposition parties. Courts sometimes ruled against the president.
All of that ended shockingly fast, and almost nobody realized it until it was too late.
Step 1: Control the Story
Putin’s first move was not economic or military — it was informational. He moved to seize NTV, the only major independent national television network. Using Gazprom as the battering ram, the Kremlin took over the board, installed loyalists, and drove critical journalists into exile.
( Trump’s version of this is to align with FOX News and other media outlets. He has a loyal oligarchs, Larry and david Ellison, buying up the major media companies. Trump uses the same meme Putin used, “fake news”. He did not make that up. I have always said, “Trump is taking dictator lessons from Vladimir Putin. Some say Orban, but Orban is a desciple of Putin.”
Donald Trump had no historical knowledge of Russia when he ran for president in 2016. He was a game show host, casino owner, real estate trader, and a white-collar criminal, looking to get richer. Putin was the richest and most powerful person on the planet in 2016. He still may be that, because i tis certain that Putin has Trump compromised by taping the election-help vs. Hillary Clinton conversations, KGB style. Remember, the translator’s notes were destroyed by Trump after his Helsinki meeting in 2017. He knew he had to cover his traitorous tracks. )
With that quiet corporate takeover, Russia no longer had a national platform capable of scrutinizing power. For most Russians, reality itself now came through a Kremlin-approved lens. Once the state controls what citizens see, everything else becomes easier.
The effect on everyday Russians has not been good. Russia’s economy is under significant strain, facing high inflation, labor shortages, weakening currency, and increased taxes. Most Russians struggle with costs and high inflation, peaking over 10% in early 2025. Central Bank rates are at 21%, slowing growth and keeping prices elevated. The Russian economy suffers from labor shortages and falling behind technologically.
Step 2: Break Federalism
In his first year, Putin created seven “federal districts” headed by presidential envoys — essentially political commissars — who could overrule elected governors. Soon after, he gained the authority to dismiss governors outright.
The message was simple: regional power is tolerated only if it aligns with the president’s agenda. Sound familiar? (This is why governor’s powers and sovereign state power is so important to preserve in the USA.)
Democracy works when power is shared. Putin ended that in a single legislative stroke.
Step 3: Turn the Upper House Into a Rubber Stamp
Originally, the Russian Federation Council was made up of governors and regional legislative heads who were elected and accountable. Putin replaced them with appointed representatives, loyal to him alone not to Russian voters.
Checks and balances require independence. Putin quietly erased it.
Today, Trump is effectively the Speaker of the House. No one seems to have the patriotic focus to challenge him.
Step 4: Rebuild the Security State
Putin surrounded himself with former KGB and FSB officers, expanding surveillance powers and re-politicizing the police. These “siloviki” became the backbone of his regime: a loyal, disciplined, unelected class with institutional muscle. Sound familiar?
Democracy can survive a run of bad politicians. It cannot survive an intelligence apparatus aligned with a single man’s agenda.
Step 5: Neutralize Economic Rivals
Putin gathered the oligarchs and offered a deal: Stay out of politics, or lose everything. MBS did the same thing. Trump helped MBS locate and round up the Saudi oligarchs as his first foreign act in 2017. Our FBI knew where they were all hiding. Trump 1.0’s first foreign destination was to Saudi Arabia, and he still calls MBS “a great guy” even though he killed an american journalist, something Trump brushed off at “stuff happens”.
Most of the Russian oligarchs folded. The ones who didn’t — Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky — were exiled or stripped of their assets. This was the elimination of independent financial power. Without competing power centers, political competition withers.
Step 6: Engineer a Dominant Party
Putin built United Russia, the machinery that would later dominate every national election. It was designed not to inspire loyalty but to enforce it. A democracy without competitive parties is just a ceremonial exercise.
(Trump rails jail the democrats and has asked for the execution of our Generals and potential candidates like Senator Kelly and Eric Swalwell. He calls is retribution, but it’s the Putin way to take over a large democratic country.)
Step 7: Rewrite Election Rules
Russian elections didn’t disappear — they were simply redesigned. Small parties were squeezed out by new technical requirements. Candidate registration became a weapon. The Central Election Commission fell under presidential influence.
Everything looked legal. Everything looked procedural. But slowly, the ballot box became a controlled environment.
We will see how our midterm elections of 2026 go. But Trump will certainly try to fix them, and if his GOP party loses, they will deny they were fair, and perhaps not “seat” the winning candidates, the way they did to the Arizona representative, Adelita Grijalva.
The Lessons to Learn from the Russian and Hungarian fasicst takeovers
Russia’s democracy did not die because Putin was especially bold.
It died because he was subtle.
Putin didn’t destroy institutions. He captured them, the way Trump has captured the CDC and BOE.
Putin didn’t outlaw opposition.
He starved them out.
He didn’t cancel elections.
He fixed them.
And the world — including the Russian people — kept waiting for a dramatic moment, some unmistakable sign of authoritarian takeover. It never came. The end arrived through a thousand bureaucratic cuts.
Democracies rarely die in one night.
They die quietly, procedurally, in full view.
Why This Matters for America
The United States is not Russia. Our institutions are older, stronger, more resilient. But they are not invincible. Every democracy is vulnerable to the same pattern:
- media capture
- politicized law enforcement
- weakened courts
- attacks on independent governors
- parties hollowed out into loyalty machines
- elections rewritten through “legal adjustments”
The methods are subtle everywhere, because subtlety works.
If there’s a single lesson from Putin’s first two years, it’s this:
The moment to defend a democracy is before the crisis is obvious. After that, the slide is much harder to stop.
America’s strength has always been that its people do not sleepwalk through history. We debate. We argue. We shout. We vote. We hold the line.
Maybe that’s what holding on to love for a country actually means: caring enough to notice the early signs — and caring enough to act before the damage becomes irreversible.
My song to save America is waiting for an artist to make this patriotic meme of love for the real American democracy go front and center in our pop culture. We need a few rallying songs to keep ourselves inwardly aligned and resolved to not allow this country to go fascist. If you know people in our military at any level, make sure they know not to follow illegal orders.
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