Abstract This article contends that Vladimir Putin’s regime is contextualized by the foundational paradigm established by Ivan IV. Faced with the challenges of an interregnum and competition with the West, Ivan IV constructed an imperial national identity, identifying authoritarian rule as the only solution for both imperatives. This forced permanent limitations on Russian attempts to modernize, explicitly negating any adaptation threatening the authoritarian structure. Determined to be recognized by the West purely on its own terms, Russia would replicate the recurring pattern of attempting to achieve that validation by force. Putin’s policy of partial modernization and imperial expansion represents the latest iteration of the enduring cycle.

Abstract This article develops a set of quantitative indicators that allow for tracing the dynamics of Russia’s political regime along two dimensions: electoral evaporation, understood as a gradual diminishing in the level of competitiveness; and autocratic personalization, understood as the rise of the personalist traits of the regime. The values of the indicators offered in this article are derivable from the objective data, not from expert coding, which increases data reliability. The indicators are country-specific. This reduces the loss of information that is unavoidable in cross-national research. Electoral evaporation is measured on the basis of election results, while for measuring autocratic personalization, the article builds a composite index involving several indicators of personalist rule. The parallel tracing of these indicators’ values throughout the period under observation, 2004–2022, shows that the evaporation of the electoral component of the regime has occurred largely in parallel with the rise of its personalist component. At the same time, slow-downs in one of the components could be compensated by the accelerated increase of the other, to the effect that the authoritarian transformation of the regime continued to progress. There were also instances when the indicators’ values concurrently increased after periods of decline on both parameters.

Abstract This article, partly on the basis of previously-unconsidered primary sources and contemporary reporting, reexamines the conspiracy theory that developed regarding the 1999 Russian apartment bombings. It concludes, first, that the Russian government had net-negative incentive to carry out the conspiracy of which it is accused. Second, had the alleged conspiracy nevertheless been undertaken, it would have very likely unraveled; its failure to do so indicates that it probably was not undertaken in the first place. And third, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence indicates that there was not a real bomb at Ryazan.

Abstract The term ‘strategic culture’ was introduced into IR scholarship in the 1970’s by scholars who wanted to understand the nuclear armaments rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. But how do we explain the foreign policy behavior of contemporary Russia based on the strategic culture? To address this question, the paper analyzes Russia’s fatal decision (2022) to attack Ukraine, and its global implications. Russia’s “special military operation” has changed the geopolitical landscape in two significant ways: a) the NATO memberships of traditional neutrals like Finland and Sweden show that strategic culture can be in a constant state of flux; b) the military balance of power in Europe is shifting in a way, not witnessed since the end of the Second World War. While there is a growing pressure to revitalize unison among the European NATO members, the possibility of Russia’s European path should not be excluded altogether.

Abstract The article analyses the patterns of framing the 1990s in the discourses circulating in the official Russian public sphere in the first year after the entry of Russia’s troops in Ukraine, that is officially called the ‘special military operation’, and the unprecedented retaliatory sanctions imposed by the West. It seeks to identify probable transformations of the myth that contrasts the turbulence of the early post-soviet period with the stability associated with Putin’s rule which previously served as a major pillar for legitimizing his power. It argues that despite Putin’s evident reluctance to recall the hardships of the 1990s in the context of an unfolding crisis, in media discourses, memories of the past traumatic experience turned out to be an essential symbolic resource for making sense of the new reality.

Abstract Russia’s confrontational vectors of foreign politics and propaganda of enmity in domestic politics reinforce its image as a besieged fortress fighting for its survival. This article argues that such fighting can be traced in Russia’s National Security Strategies, adopted in 2009, 2015, and 2021. Additionally, considering the rather monolithic worldview of Russian elites, these strategies may reflect how they comprehend fighting and war in politics. This research draws on theories of the ontology of war, elaborated by Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, and the concept of enemies. The mixed-methods approach of critical discourse analysis combined with quantitative analysis of the content reveals that fighting, and war in general, occupy a central place in Russian strategic thinking which may reflect the Russian elites’ growing reliance on fighting as a driver of sociopolitical changes.

Abstract Manipulative rhetoric has long proven to be an effective tool for political leaders seeking to influence social behavior. Yet, the nuances of these manipulative tactics remain understudied in autocracies. Using the Russian case under Vladimir Putin’s presidency, I test and show how priming and terror management theories explain Putin’s high approval rating under economic circumstances where research would otherwise expect approval to wane. Specifically, I employ text-as-data methods to identify Putin’s priming emphasis on an existential threat emanating from Western countries. I furthermore argue and find that this “external threat” priming tactic utilized by Putin helps him to instill existential fear among citizens. This, in turn, stimulates narratives of national unification and deflects people’s attention away from Russia’s economic decline. In leveraging my text-as-data measures within a series of secondary statistical analyses, I then determine that (i) while external threat priming does not affect public approval alone, (ii) such threat narratives, nevertheless, allow Putin to maintain an especially high approval rating during times of domestic economic turmoil.

Abstract The ongoing discussion about Russian politics in the 1990s revolves around narratives of democratization (which seemingly ended in the 2000s under Vladimir Putin’s leadership) and neoliberal market reforms (which seemingly paved the way for the country’s authoritarian drift). However, it is time to reassess the Russian experience of the 1990s from a different perspective. In this article, I argue that the political and institutional foundations of the Russian personalist authoritarian regime were laid during the 1990s. The process of the Soviet collapse significantly contributed to Russia’s succession of the Soviet state and its reliance on various legacies of the Soviet Union in domestic politics and foreign policy. At the same time, Russia’s elites and leaders in the 1990s had little interest in building electoral democracy (which implies the possibility of losing power through electoral means) and intended to maximize their power amid major political and economic changes. They intentionally rejected political compromises, effectively used political polarization at every critical juncture of Russian politics in the 1990s, and opted for the least democratic solutions. While democratization in Russia during the 1990s was sacrificed for the sake of market reforms amid a long and deep transformational recession, the authoritarian turn of the country was postponed to the future.

Abstract This paper studies how life satisfaction of Russians changed in 2022, the year when Russia started the full-scale war in Ukraine. Applying panel regression analysis, the life satisfaction of Russians in 2022 is compared with that in 2021 and 2020. The RLMS-HSE data suggests that the average life satisfaction of Russians increased; however, this increase was accompanied by a larger percentage of respondents who dropped out the sample, and therefore it can at least partly be explained by a self-selection bias. A decline in life satisfaction was observed in respondents with higher university degrees and amongst religious Muslims, i.e., respondents, who not only associate themselves with Muslim traditions but also report that they believe in God (Allah). Regarding males, the effects holding religious beliefs, but belonging to a confession other than Islam, such as Russian Orthodox, are positive, as they expressed increased life satisfaction. Furthermore, greater income is also associated with an increase in life satisfaction among Russian males in 2022 in comparison with 2021 and 2020, but this factor had a non-significant impact on females.

Abstract Russia’s war against Ukraine was the immediate impetus for the realization of the strategic intentions of the Russian leadership – to “integrate the war into the national economy” and to turn the defense sector into the driving force of the country’s development. The strategic character of all these changes affects the country’s territorial structure: we observe the “rise” of the defense-linked regions. These regions demonstrated high levels of economic growth and employers created special conditions for those employed in defense enterprises. However, these special conditions were accompanied by the instigation of strict schemes of management from Moscow. Moscow is strengthening its influence in the defense-linked regions through direct control over the defense enterprises and center-regional patronal networks. The new situation leads to a change in the position of governors in the defense-linked regions. Regional governors, on the contrary, lose control over the most important sector of the economy in their regions and the possibility to formulate the agenda for the development of their regions. The model of center-regional relations in Russia whose sustainability was based on uniformity becomes more asymmetric.