Russian Political Development Research Articles

How the natural resource curse contributed to the autocratic developments in Russian politics since the fall of the USSR

The natural resource sector has become a dominant part of the Russian economy and thus affected the political developments of the state greatly. Understanding of the interplay of Russian politics and economics after the fall of the Soviet Union is integral for understanding why Russia has developed steadily into a more autocratic direction during the past few decades. The phenomenon through which we will be analyzing the intertwining of political and economic spheres of Russia is the natural resource curse concept. We seek to understand what factors have contributed to Russia’s failure to avoid the natural resource curse and give examples on how the natural resource curse manifests itself especially in today’s Russia political reality. Does the abundance of natural resources contribute to the emergence of a hyper-presidential, autocratic regime in Russia?

Russia’s 2020 Constitutional Reform: The Politics of Institutionalizing the Status-Quo

Abstract The articles in this issue explore the longer-term implications of Russia’s 2020 Constitutional Reform process. Assessing constitutional change from different theoretical and empirical approaches, these authors find that the constitution largely codified the status-quo as it had evolved over the past decade. The resulting institutional changes solidified the personalist political system that concentrates power in one leader. These reforms also created new mechanisms to preclude elite defection and generate societal quiescence. At the same time, the three-staged reform process that included formal adoption, national vote, and legal reconciliation, introduced new political risk by raising societal expectations, reinforcing cleavages through patriotic legitimization strategies, introducing new rigid structures, and relying on personalism and networks over institutional governance. These risks do not predict state failure but they suggest new challenges that will continue to shape Russian political development.

Custiniana: The Many Histories of a Single Trip to Russia 180 Years Ago, and Why It Matters Today

CustinianaThe Many Histories of a Single Trip to Russia 180 Years Ago, and Why It Matters Today Daniel Peris (bio) As I prepared to return to Russia in 2019 for the first time in nearly two decades, I found myself reading the travelogue of a minor French nobleman and man of letters, the Marquis de Custine, about a three-month sojourn he had made there 180 years earlier, in 1839. His La Russie en 1839 (Russia in 1839), published in several editions in the 1840s, is a prime example of the well-established genre of travelers' accounts to Russia.1 While most such works quickly fade from view and are left for the narrower consumption of historians, Custine's "letters" have had an extraordinary longevity and impact, far greater than the author might ever have imagined. They live on almost two centuries later as a platform for generations of Westerners, specifically Americans, to judge the Russian polity and reveal the changing American mood about Russia. Moreover, the frequent reprinting and referencing of Custine's view of Russia suggests one of the key reasons why US policy makers have struggled to understand Russia in the postwar period. Again and again, Custine's description of 1830s Russia is used to contrast a presumed native Russian "despotism" versus the ultimate emergence of a Western-style [End Page 345] classical "liberalism." This binary opposition masks the Russian historical orientation toward a strong state rather than the Western preference for a strong civil society. In short, our assumption that Russia must inevitably adopt Western liberalism—using Custine as the totem of a darker past—has failed as an analytical framework. It is time to move on. In the meantime, policy makers and even experienced Russia watchers would benefit from understanding how their predecessors have fared on what has become a distinctive political Rorschach test in regard to Russia. Custine's travelogue raises the usual academic questions of context, bias, perspective, the approach to the "other," and so on that attends using travelers' accounts as a primary historical source. While acknowledging the importance of those issues, this treatment focuses on the nearly unique deployment of Custine in subsequent prolonged debates about Russia's political future and foreign relations. Custiniana—the longevity and many uses of his account—moves beyond the typical point-in-time perspective of a traditional primary source to its arc of interpretation and meaning through time and to various parties. In Custine's case, that trajectory has been extreme to the point of ironic: his highly critical view of Russia is now, nearly two centuries later, regularly cited by Western observers to point to an alternative, liberal, and benign future path for Russian political development. Indeed, Custine's account has become a constituent of the attitudes, the actual relations, and even the very definition of "Russia and the West," shedding as much light on the observer as on the observed. The Setting At the time Russia in 1839 appeared to acclaim in the 1840s, there was little reason to believe that it would be well read and referenced two centuries later and deeply intertwined with 21st-century views of Russia. It was the work of a minor author and, objectively, a minor work itself. Born in the early stages of the French Revolution, Astolphe de Custine (1790–1857) endured having his grandfather—a general in the revolutionary army—and his young father die by the guillotine. An active salon figure, his mother Delphine only just escaped their fate. As a youth and then as an adult, Custine had traveled widely throughout Europe. At the age of 34, he was outed as a homosexual. While that may have limited some of his social interactions in French high society, he lived openly with another man for the remainder of his life in a way that did not appear to materially hinder his writing opportunities. Custine emerged as a writer relatively late in life, in the 1830s, when he was in his 40s and enjoyed a degree of financial independence associated with [End Page 346] the income, properties, and title inherited upon the death of his mother in 1826. And although he was close to...

The Phenomenon of Propaganda as Reflected in Victor Pelevin’s novel S.N.U.F.F.

The aim of this paper is to draw a parallel between today’s situation – not only political and military, but also between the ideological confrontation between Russia and the Western world and the religious wars, which were waged during the Reformation, and Counterreformation in Europe in the 17th century. Epoch when arguably wars were waged not only for the military domination in Europe, but also, and most importantly, for the minds of people. Jose Antonio Maravall in his book “Culture of Baroque: Analysis of Historical Structure” describes the means of influencing audiences, calling this influence a “Baroque mechanism”. The connection between the modern times and the epoch of Baroque is also described in Greg Lambert‘s book “The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture”. Lambert is comparing the alliance between politics and culture present in the modern world to that of Baroque epoch. Recent developments in Russian history and its reflection by the state propaganda and television quite often make the citizens feel that it is almost impossible to tell where fictional tragedy ends and a real one starts. The occupation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the sanctions that followed gave rise to a new spiral of Russian propaganda which gave an impetus to a new wave of nationalism on the government-sponsored television and created the so called “Olgin Trolls” on the internet. This policy of state-sponsored ideology and propaganda found its reflection in Russian literature. Prominent contemporary writers, such as Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, gained almost prophetic status for their ability to predict developments in Russian politics albeit in a satirical and provocative form. By describing the present, Pelevin models the future and for this reason he is often credited with prophetic qualities. It seems that he manages to foresee not only the general outline of events, but also the smallest details. While reading Pelevin, one cannot help returning back to the title page and double check the date – it's hard to believe that the book has been written not in the wake of the Chechen wars (Generation II) or the hybrid war with Ukraine (S.N.U.F.F.) but anticipated the events and provided their astonishingly accurate description. As a rule, Pelevin's books outpace the historic events by about five to six years. Presumably we are not dealing here with a mystical providence, but with Pelevin’s unique ability to observe and his brilliant capacity for analysis. The aim of this paper is to analyze Viktor Pelevin’s novel S.N.U.F.F. This post apocalyptic novel was published in 2011 and predicted the confrontation between Russia and the Western world, which began after 2014. Pelevin suggested even the name of Ukraine, albeit in a distorted form – Urkaina, which is a derivative of укры (the term which became to serve as a pejorative name for Ukranians in Russia), орки (Orks by Tolkien) and урки (prisoners in the prison jargon). Although the book describes a dystopian future, one can clearly establish a connection with modern day realities. One of main discourses of the book is a fusion of ideology and art. The research based on works by Greg Lambert and Jose Antonio Maravall will be mainly focused on the analysis of the system, created in Pelevin’s book. In this system society is based on the films it is itself producing. The films are divided in two halves: one part of the film is a pornographic footage, and other part is a footage of killing during war, hence both the book and the films are called snuffs. The films relentlessly fed to the public serve to educate it and to offer it news. In this way they are the only source of information in Pelevin’s dystopia. The connection discussed in this paper will show that these films carry out not only an educational and information functions, they also become the main object of a religious cult and are an integral part of ideological and religious propaganda. The results of our analysis will hopefully show the mechanisms and effects of such forceful cultural pressure on individuals and how they can cope with and resist the pressure of goverment-controlled media.

Russian Politics at the End of 2015: Continuing Deinstitutionalization

This issue includes a series of articles that highlight developments in Russian politics during the course of 2015. The articles analyze key trends that have developed in Russian politics, economic...

The influence of regime type on Russian foreign policy toward “the West,” 1992–2015

Russia's foreign policy does not follow directly from the nature of its internal political system but rather from the interaction of that political system with other political systems. Russian policy toward the Western world is best understood in terms of the capacity of Russia's post-Soviet rulers to achieve two goals that are in implicit tension with each other. They are: a) maximizing the benefit to the Russian state of the country's multifaceted relations with the Western world; and b) securing Russia's status as the undisputed hegemon throughout the country's historical borderlands. These broad policy objectives—shared by Russian liberals and nationalists alike–have been common to both the Yeltsin and Putin administrations, albeit expressed in different ways over time and with differing expectations of being able to reconcile the two. Building upon authoritarian and interventionist patterns established early in the Yeltsin years and reacting to the West's refusal to acknowledge Russian regional primacy, Putin has consolidated an arbitrary personalist regime at home and waged war along the Russian periphery, even at the cost of relations with the Western world. In this respect, Putin's regime may usefully be seen as a “state-nation” with a strong imperial imprint, building upon powerful legacies of Russian political development. The removal of Putin from power will not in se change that regime type or key challenges in Russian–Western relations.

Developments in Russian Politics 8. Eds. Stephen White, Richard Sakwa, and Henry E. Hale. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. xx, 300 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $94.95, Hard bound. - Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia. By Samuel A. Greene. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. xii, 276 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Figures. Tables. Index. $29.95, paper.

Developments in Russian Politics 8. Eds. Stephen White, Richard Sakwa, and Henry E. Hale. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. xx, 300 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $94.95, Hard bound. - Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia. By Samuel A. Greene. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. xii, 276 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Figures. Tables. Index. $29.95, paper. - No Illusions: The Voices of Russia’s Future Leaders. By Ellen Mickiewicz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 255 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Index. $29.95, hard bound. - Volume 75 Issue 2

Developments in Russian politics 8

Developments in Russian politics 8

Alexeev, Michael and Weber, Shlomo (eds). The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy (review)

REVIEWS 583 sistema is just one, a particular manifestation of a widespread phenomenon, that exists within a particular institutional space that give it a set of resources that are not available to others. At times Ledeneva acknowledges this. For example, she notes that control over formal institutions such as courts enables Putin to punish the informality of others to the advantage of his sistema. At other times, the difference between sistema and systemic is blurred and they are treated as equivalents. When this happens sistema becomes ‘everything’ and a very loose analytical concept. This is problematic on all sorts of levels. One consequence is that it is not always clear that the evidence that Ledeneva cites is using ‘system’ or ‘systematic’ in the same way that she is. A lot of the time it looks as if she is inferring the existence of sistema where others are talking about ‘system’ or ‘systematic’ and referring to something else entirely: the Soviet party-state, totalitarianism, corruption, injustice and weak rule of law and property rights, etc. Another consequence is that where formal institutions constrain informality (and vice versa) slips in and out of focus. This makes it hard to see how we can explain Russian political development using the idea of sistema, or compare Russia to other polities that have similar problems operating formal and informal institutions. Sistema is an attractive idea but it is unlikely to replace other means of describing Russian politics that allow for such comparisons and that have sharper analytical edges with which to try to say something about how Russian politics is going to develop. Department of Politics and Public Administration Neil Robinson University of Limerick Alexeev, Michael and Weber, Shlomo (eds). The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. xiv + 849 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. References. Index. £110.00. The objective of the editors is to assemble ‘up-to-date papers on a broad range of topics’ (p. 2) on Russian economic developments in the context of transformation from the Soviet system. The various contributions are intended to assess the effects of historical legacies as well as the current state of the Russian economy and its future prospects. There are thirty-three chapters, written by Russian and Western authors, including some well-known figures in the field (such as Vladimir Popov, Vladimir Mau, Valeriy Kryukov, Arild Moe, Stephen Fortesque, Steven Rosefielde, Pekka Sutela, Judith Thornton, Leonid Polischuk, Vladimir Gimpelson, Judith Shapiro and others). The papers are gathered into six sections: the past — covering the Soviet period, dismantling the command economy, transformation and privatization; institutions and governance — outlining corporate governance, the tax system, the unofficial SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 584 economy and corruption; resources and environment, with chapters on oil, gas, electricity, mineral resources and environmental regulation; financial and non-financial sectors — the military industrial complex, high-tech industries, agriculture, banking and finance and trade; a section on regions; and finally a concluding set of chapters on policy and social challenges, with papers on the labour market, higher education, health care, inequality and demographic developments. Collectively, the chapters cover effectively the major trends and developments of the post-Soviet Russian economy. Most of the chapters are research based, well referenced and illustrated, and contain useful citations to other works. The authors provide good detailed overviews of their topics, often with relevant comparisons to the preceding Soviet period and some make contrasts with other post-socialist countries. Most of the authors accept the assumptions of the Washington consensus (privatization, free market systems, limited state involvement, financialization and openness to the world market) as a framework against which to discuss the transformation of Russia and possible futuredevelopments.Henceformostofthecontributors,themanyinadequacies and distortions in the Russian economy are explained as consequences of the Soviet heritage and are to be alleviated by more efficient marketization, more effective privatization and appropriate institutions. Contributors highlight the post-socialist Russian experience by making comparisons with, and contrasts to, the Soviet period and Western practices. Many authors provide useful conceptual tools such as ‘state capture’ and ‘business capture’. The latter is a form of corruption where government officials obtain rent from profit earned by companies. Widespread corruption is...

Ledeneva, Alena V. Can Russia Modernise? ‘Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 582 Ledeneva, Alena V. Can Russia Modernise? ‘Sistema’, Power Networks and Informal Governance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013. xv + 314 pp. Figures. Tables. Boxes. Notes. Appendices. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. £19.99: $32.99 (paperback). Can Russia Modernise? completes a trilogy of books by Alena Ledeneva on howinformalinstitutionsandpracticeshaveshapedmodernRussia.Thetrilogy mirrors the development of modern Russia. The first book, Russia’s Economy of Favours (Cambridge, 1998), focussed on blat´ (influence and influence peddling), how it was used to cope with the dysfunctions of the Soviet system and how it shaped early post-Soviet society and economy by subverting the market rationality that reformers hoped would transform Russia. The second book, How Russia Really Works (Ithaca, NY, 2006), moved things on, looking at how blat´ was married to new practices such as kompromat (compromising materials) to subvert formal political and market institutions in post-Soviet Russia. The first two books were about systems in flux. The blat´ system that Ledeneva described was evolving. The informal practices described in the second book were chaotic, and it was hard to see how they could be sustainable. Although the second book was written whilst Putin was consolidating power the practices that How Russia Really Works describes were very much of the El´tsin period and reflected the instabilities of that time. Ledeneva’s new book moves things on again. Can Russia Modernise? is an analysis of the informal institutions of the Putin era. Although some of the practices described in the previous books still exist, they are now part of what Ledeneva calls ‘sistema’, a system of governance that she identifies as being ‘Putin’s’ (p. 25). This sistema is not just a set of survival strategies or means to access power and resources in an environment that is formally underinstitutionalized . It reproduces itself and poses an obstacle to change. Unlike the chaos of the El´tsin period, sistema is more durable. Although there might be a desire to modernize the Russian polity and economy the networks and relationships that sistema consists of are effective both as substitutes for formal state bureaucracy and as means of co-opting political and economic forces and leaders. As a result, there is a ‘modernisation trap’: efforts at modernization use the informal methods and networks of sistema that they aim to replace so that the results of modernization are sub-optimal and sistema is reproduced. Even the effects of exogenous forces for change such as global economic integration are distorted by sistema so that they have a different form in Russia. The research that Ledeneva has done is revealing of elite attitudes and the relationship between wealth and power in contemporary Russia. The concept of sistema is not without its problems, however. Informal relations and their use are systemic in Russia but are they actually a ‘system’? It is possible to read Ledeneva’s research as pointing to multiple ‘systems’ of which the Putin REVIEWS 583 sistema is just one, a particular manifestation of a widespread phenomenon, that exists within a particular institutional space that give it a set of resources that are not available to others. At times Ledeneva acknowledges this. For example, she notes that control over formal institutions such as courts enables Putin to punish the informality of others to the advantage of his sistema. At other times, the difference between sistema and systemic is blurred and they are treated as equivalents. When this happens sistema becomes ‘everything’ and a very loose analytical concept. This is problematic on all sorts of levels. One consequence is that it is not always clear that the evidence that Ledeneva cites is using ‘system’ or ‘systematic’ in the same way that she is. A lot of the time it looks as if she is inferring the existence of sistema where others are talking about ‘system’ or ‘systematic’ and referring to something else entirely: the Soviet party-state, totalitarianism, corruption, injustice and weak rule of law and property rights, etc. Another consequence is that where formal institutions constrain informality (and vice versa) slips in and out of focus. This makes it hard to see how we can explain Russian political development using the idea...

The last resort of political regionalism: electoral blocs in Russia's regional legislative elections, 2003–2005

A key element of the agenda of re-centralisation launched by the Russian authorities in the early 2000s was the territorial penetration of national political parties. This analysis empirically demonstrates that despite all efforts at institutional engineering, political regionalism survived and flourished in the form of regional electoral coalitions (blocs) in 2003–2005, which created a crucial obstacle to the pro-government party's monopolistic control over regional legislatures. While this obstacle was removed during the process of authoritarian transformation, recent developments in Russian politics suggest that there is a potential for the return of political regionalism.

Russian Civil Societies: Conventional and "Virtual"

Recent developments in Russian politics present a challenge to the traditional understanding of civil society. In hybrid regimes like Russia, conventional civil society is often weak. But as recent events in Russia demonstrate, with the rise of the Internet, ”virtual” civil society-fostered through dense networks of online interaction-may function as a substitute, providing the basis for civic activism even in the presence of an anemic conventional civil society. This mixture of weak conventional civil society and robust ”virtual” civil society imparts a particular dynamic to state-society relations within hybrid regimes in the Internet age. As this essay demonstrates, ”virtual” civil society breeds weak political organization and a false sense of representativeness within political oppositions, at the same time as injecting a greater degree of volatility into politics and presenting incumbent regimes with particular challenges for repression.

Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History , and: Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (review)

Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History. viii + 268 p., ill. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 9780875804255. $42.00. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration. xii + 298 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0300110630. $40.00. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye notes in his book on Russian orientalism that what Asia means to is extremely complex: Much more familiar with the than other Europeans, Russians have invariably seen the Orient in a multiplicity of hues. Whether foe or friend, danger or destiny, other or self ... their perceptions of Asia have defied easy characterization (238). How, then, has the been perceived and understood, interpreted and reinterpreted by Russians? What kind of impact has the East had on Russian political development, Russian culture, and the Russian mentality? What role has Russia's peculiar location between and West played in shaping its identity? These and other questions are analyzed in the two books reviewed here, which are unified by their attention to the role of space in Russian history and self-perception. Of course, such an approach is not completely new. Generations of historians, economists, sociologists, and geographers have recognized the tremendous role of a spatial factor in the life of Russia, even at times claiming that the soul of Russia and the main trends of its development were a function of its territorial magnitude. Yet it is not traditional geographical determinism that constitutes the theoretical base of the two books under review. Space is treated here as a postmodernist category, fluid and unstable, open for interpretation and reinterpretation, created and re-created by human imagination and social activity. Geographical boundaries, note the editors of Space, Place, and Power, are not necessarily objective and absolute: very much to the contrary, they are often provisional and discursive. Russian space should be contextualized within broad global trends such as colonization and urbanization, and scholars' attention should be directed away from the centers of societies to their peripheries, which are increasingly seen as sites of historical significance (4, 8). It is within this framework that the authors of the two books under review analyze diverse topics related to the spatial dimension of Russian history. John Randolph and Richard Stites demonstrate how the factors of space and place helped create and reinforce various social communities and hierarchies: Randolph explores the specific social group of iamsbchiki (coachmen) along the road between Moscow and St. Petersburg; Stites examines the traditional social hierarchies as represented on the dance floors of the 18th and early 19th centuries. In the 18th century the necessity of supporting travel along the main imperial road, Randolph notes, compelled the tsarist government to create a specific class of individuals who, while not free, possessed a certain elements of distinction and autonomy granted by the state. In the cases of conflicts between the iamshchiki and influential travelers, including powerful officials and landowners, the authorities frequently had to support the coachmen, a highly unusual social inversion in the age of serfdom (84-90). For many 18th- and 19th-century travelers, iamshchiki symbolized the best qualities of the Russian narod (common folk). As Stites shows, the narod was also represented at the noble and imperial balls in national costumes and stylized peasant dances, which became especially popular in conjunction with the Napoleonic invasion of (111). Even as space formed group identities and influenced social activities, it was in turn shaped and reshaped by people, as is evident in a number of articles presented in Space, Place, and Power. …

(Re)writing Russian History

December 2 on marked the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The evil empire and the Cold War disappeared, not with civil strife or the long-feared global conflagration, but suddenly and almost bloodlessly. As the nemesis and mirror of the west, the USSR had acted as a polestar for everything from foreign policy to weapons systems to popular culture, one that could divide as much as it united. Soviet history itself was contested ground, as it could be made to speak to everything from the general validity of socialism (and therefore capitalism) or to the nature of Russia (and therefore, the west). Twenty years on, this political valence has ebbed but has not disappeared entirely.Michael Kort's The Soviet Colossus, a classic survey of modern Russian history, is emblematic of the debates surrounding the Soviet past and how perspectives have changed - or, in some cases, stayed the same - as we move away from the Cold War/ Colossus remains among the most widely used texts on the USSR, and for good reason; it is accessible, well written, and covers a great range of material in a fairly short space. First published in 1985, Kort's work offered a general history of the USSR together with a concise account of pre-revolutionary Russia. Kort examined Russian political development from ancient Rus' through to the end of the old regime, highlighting the origins of the Russian autocracy, the intelligentsia, and the various strains of the late imperial period before moving on to Soviet history proper. The first edition of Colossus carried through to the gerontocracy of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chemenko, and though the author was aware of the internal strains within Soviet society - and presciently drew attention, for instance, to the challenge of resurgent nationalism - he, like most contemporary observers, did not believe that such problems had become a challenge to the system itself (293). Kort amended successive editions to reflect new developments (the book now extends to the Putin era), though his treatment of earlier periods is largely unchanged.Colossus' narrative traced broad lines of continuity between pre- and postrevolutionary Russia, evoking throughout a highly bifurcated view of the world - east versus west. In part, this perspective grew out of the reality of the divergence between Russia and Europe, and in part reflected a rhetorical and heuristic tradition that has a long pedigree in both western and Russian historical scholarship. Consistent with this view, Colossus stressed the statist, bureaucratic, and authoritarian nature of Russian and Soviet societies, tracing historical continuity across the revolutionary divide. Yet in seeking continuity, Kort projected his conception of the USSR - totalitarian and antiwestern - deep into the Russian past.Kort's work fell firmly within the totalitarian school of Soviet history, a model that has been challenged over the years but remains popular. Broadly speaking, this approach conceives of the Soviet Union as a dictatorial police state in which a single ruler (Stalin) or the Communist party elite controlled an atomized, brutalized, and apathetic population through terror, surveillance, economic planning, and propaganda. This interpretive framework owed much to the pioneering theory of Hannah Arendt, as well as to the accounts of Russian emigres fleeing to the west. Foundational works by Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others focused on the centrality of Communist ideology, along with the creation and function of the Soviet party-state, at the time still shrouded in much uncertainty.2 Such works provided invaluable accounts of the inner function of the Kremlin - the view from within the black box - along with the horrors of the Gulag, the purges, and collectivization. The totalitarian approach also stressed similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, a view that had policy implications for governments facing the postwar emergence of a Soviet superpower. …

White, S. Sakwa, R. Hale, H. E. Developments in Russian Politics 7 (review)

White, S. Sakwa, R. Hale, H. E. Developments in Russian Politics 7 (review)

Developments in Russian politics 7

Developments in Russian politics 7

Eurasian polities as hybrid regimes: The case of Putin's Russia

Most Eurasian countries' political systems are not accurately described as some version of either democracy or authoritarianism. Nor does it advance social science to study each of these countries' political systems as being completely unique, sharing no significant commonalities with those of other countries. Instead, it is more fruitful to understand many Eurasian countries as a type of hybrid regime, a system that combines important elements of both democracy and autocracy in some way. One of the most important features of Eurasia's hybrid regimes, one that is shared by many hybrid regimes worldwide, is that they combine contested elections with pervasive political clientelism. Political developments in these countries can thus be usefully understood as machine politics, and the development of political systems can be understood as processes of rearranging the components of the machines in different ways. The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated through an in-depth study of the Russian Federation. It is argued that Russian political development under Putin is best understood not as “authoritarianization” but as a process in which Russia transitioned from a system of “competing pyramids” of machine power to a “single-pyramid” system, a system dominated by one large political machine. It turns out that in single-pyramid systems that preserve contested elections, as does Russia, public opinion matters more than in typical authoritarian regimes.

Russia--lost in transition: the Yeltsin and Putin legacies

Russian history is first and foremost a history of personalized power. As Russia startles the international community with its assertiveness and faces both parliamentary and presidential elections, Lilia Shevtsova searches the histories of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes. She explores within them conventional truths and myths about Russia, paradoxes of Russian political development, and Russia's role in the world. Russia --Lost in Transition discovers a logic of government in Russia --a political regime and the type of capitalism that were formulated during the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies and will continue to dominate Russia's trajectory in the near term. Looking forward as well as back, Shevtsova speculates about the upcoming elections as well as the self-perpetuating system in place --the legacies of Yeltsin and Putin --and how it will dictate the immediate political future. She also explores several scenarios for Russia's future over the next decade.

Developments in Russian Politics 6 by Stephen White , Zvi Gitelman , Richard Sakwa (review)

REVIEWS 183 were critical weapons in the armoury of Russia's conservatives, and the state placed great stress on its role as protector of its people. Pipes's argument does not pay adequate attention to the dynamism of the Russian autocracy and to the ways in which itwas changing, especially after 1850. He does recognize that the Great Reforms introduced a new element into the relationship between state and society, but does not see that the reforms helped to bring a modern civil society inRussia intobeing in the second half of thenineteenth century. Pipes's view of Russian conservatism is narrow in conception and he needs to take a more nuanced approach to the ideologies that buttressed the Russian state.Much recent research in both Russia and the West has offered detailed insights intoRussian statehood and has provided us with a deeper understanding of the ideas thatmotivated Russian monarchs and their close advisers. Pipes's disappointing book takes an intensely traditional approach to the intellectual history of the Russian state; a history of autocracy and its proponents remains to be written. School of History Peter Waldron Universityof East Anglia White, Stephen; Gitelman, Zvi and Sakwa, Richard (eds). Developments in Russian Politics 6. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2005. xviii + 284 pp. Notes. Tables. Maps. Figures. Guide to further reading. Bibliography. Index. ?18.99 (paperback). 'Transition' is now a complex term, but it once denoted a set of transforma tions involving a fairly straight-forward idea of, at least, its startingand finish ingpoints. Anyone interested in understanding the deep changes experienced (and also endured) by Russians over the lastfifteenyears will almost certainly be familiar with the present series.Developments inRussian Politics 6 refines and develops previous surveys, updating them to cover the main events since 2001. A veteran editorial effort, the Developments series too has undergone an interest ing evolution since 1990, reflectingboth the fluidpolitical realities itexamines, and the limitsof the transition paradigm. The makeup of the present edition has once more adapted to the times. The core work remains focused on the Russian presidency, the parliament, the electoral and party systems, the rule of law, foreign policy, regionalism and the federal structure, and social and economic policy. The previous version carried a section on 'current developments', including the chapters on crime, health care, media and a tentative reconstruction of Russian national identityby Vera Tolz. The new edition has merged the issues of crime and health into an interesting and comprehensive new chapter on 'Social Policy in Post-Soviet Russia' by Judy Twigg (chapter 12), has kept an illuminating and up-to-date section on 'Media and Political Communication' by Sarah Oates (chapter 7), and has dropped Tolz's contribution in favour of a new essay by Alfred B. Evans Jr. which explores the fate of civil society (chapter 6). If there is a common thread running through all the contributions it is the 184 SEER, 86, I, 2008 sense that Putin's counterterrorist measures (involving, for one, a palpable retreat on civil liberties)might yet be the harbinger of a new phase inRussian politics, the threshold onto a new kind of authoritarian, if still electoral, regime. The new chapter on foreign policy, written byMargot Light, is one of this edition's foremost improvements (chapter 13).As Alex Pravda before her, Light breaks Russian foreign policy into the twin discussions ofMoscow's approach to its near and far abroad, but manages to present a far more systematic picture of her topic by extending on several of Pravda's points. She agrees that, throughout the 1990s, Russian foreign policy was often contradictory and unstable, but provides a brief discussion on those institu tional factors which were behind it. For Light, the responsibilities of the ministry of foreign affairs and presidency were never really distinguished until the arrival of Primakov, some two years after the adoption of theConstitution in 1993. Even then, as she explains, these lineswere still susceptible of being suddenly blurred by the often explosive and erratic political personality of El'tsin. Putin's arrival has changed all this,giving theKremlin's international policy a more pragmatic and realist spirit, and Russia's refusal to join the US/UK coalition...

Le retour du Léviathan : la politique de recentralisation en Russie depuis 2000

<titre>The Return of the Leviathan: Re-centralization Policy in Russia since 2000 </titre> During a television appearance on September 13,2004, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a series of political reforms including the cancellation of elections for representatives of the executive branch of government in the regions of the Russian Federation. This return to the appointment of governors concludes the re-centralization policy initiated in 2000, in response to the spontaneous regionalization process of the 1990s, which had proved difficult to control. What are the sources of this recentralization policy, and the principles and fundamental interests behind it? How have these factors influenced its evolution and its effects? How important is this re-centralization process in Russian political development, and what are its prospects today? To answer these questions, we re-examine the regionalization process of the 1990s. Next, we consider what ideologies and interests were driving Russian political protagonists during the recentralization process that followed, as well as their influence upon the course of federal reform, which we can describe as &#8220;new centralism&#8221; (as opposed to Soviet-style &#8220;old centralism&#8221;). Finally, we analyze the implementation of this new policy and its effects on the process of State reform.