Browse

This book studies the role of US media in presenting American values as principally different from and superior to those of Russia. The analysis focuses on the media’s narratives, frames, and nature of criticism of the Russian side and is based on texts of editorials of selected mainstream newspapers in the United States and other media sources. The book identifies five media narratives of Russia—“transition to democracy” (1991–1995), “chaos” (1995–2005), “neo-Soviet autocracy” (2005–2013), “foreign enemy” (since 2014), and “collusion” (since 2016)—each emerging in a particular context and supported by distinct frames. The increasingly negative presentation of Russia in the US media is explained by the countries’ cultural differences, interstate competition, and polarizing domestic politics. Interstate conflicts served to consolidate the media’s presentation of Russia as “autocratic,” adversarial, and involved in “collusion” with Donald Trump to undermine American democracy. Russia’s centralization of power and anti-American attitudes also contributed to the US media presentation of Russia as a hostile Other. These internal developments did not initially challenge US values and interests and were secondary in their impact on the formation of Russia image in America. The United States’ domestic partisan divide further exacerbated perception of Russia as a threat to American democracy. Russia’s interference in the US elections deepened the existing divide, with Russia becoming a convenient target for media attacks. Future value conflicts in world politics are likely to develop in the areas where states lack internal confidence and where their preferences over the international system conflict.

This book examines the development of Russia's current federal system of government from its Soviet origins, through Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, to the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and the early years of Vladimir Putin. The theoretical relationship between democracy, law, and federalism is examined with a focus on its application to the study of post‐authoritarian state systems. Federal institutions shape political agendas in the constituent units of a federation just as much as those units influence the shape of the federal whole. Case studies focus on Russia's 21 ethnic ‘republics’ (out of 89 units in a complicated multi‐level federal hierarchy) using previously unpublished primary source materials, including official documents and interviews with key participants on a variety of institutional levels.

This is an analysis of how fundamental change came about in the Soviet Union and of the part played by political leadership. In its most general aspect, it is a contribution to the literature on democratization and transitions from authoritarian rule. More specifically, it examines the evolution of Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformist politician and his major role in the political transformation of the Soviet Union and in ending the Cold War. The failures as well as the successes of perestroika are examined – economic reform that left the system in limbo and the break‐up of the Soviet state that Gorbachev had attempted to hold together on the basis of a new and voluntary federation or looser confederation. The institutional power of the General Secretary was such that only a reformer in that office could undertake peaceful systemic change in such a long‐established, post‐totalitarian authoritarian regime as the USSR, with its sophisticated instruments of control and coercion. In embracing the pluralization of the Soviet political system and thereby removing the monopoly of power of the Communist Party, Gorbachev undermined his own power base. His embrace of new ideas, amounting to a conceptual revolution, combined with his power of appointment, made possible, however, what Gorbachev himself described as revolutionary change by evolutionary means. Mikhail Gorbachev's lasting merit lies in the fact that he presided over, and facilitated, the introduction of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, religious freedom, and freedom of movement, and left Russia a freer country than it had been in its long history.

Russia’s hybrid war on the West has begun to afflict Western politics in ways that are remarkably similar to its effects on the “lands in between,” small, vulnerable countries in Europe situated in between Russia and the European Union. While many in the West are only beginning to understand how hybrid war affects politics at home, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections and subsequent elections in Europe brought to the fore problems that front-line states had been dealing with for years. Their experiences hold important lessons. This book, written by a US expert on Europe with wide experience in the UK, France, Czechia, Poland, and Russia, shows how this conflict has deepened political polarization in the lands in between, forcing countries to face a “civilizational choice” between Russia and the European Union. Russia’s hybrid warfare techniques are designed to divide countries through funding extremist parties, spreading disinformation, and threatening military force. Meanwhile, the European Union has not backed down in its drive to create a “Europe whole and free,” composed of modern democracies integrated in the EU market. While countries are faced with a stark choice, paradoxically, the political leaders who rise to the top are not those who chart a clear direction for their countries, but cynical power brokers who find ways to profit from both sides. For Western readers, grasping this new politics of polarization and power brokers is necessary to understand our new politics of hybrid war.

This book features a collection of essays on Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics. The essays focus on the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, his policies, how he compares with his predecessors, as well as changes in Russia’s political landscape. This volume is a present from colleagues and friends to Archie Brown on the occasion of his retirement as Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of St. Antony’s College. Brown has gained international recognition for his studies on the politics of Communist and post-Communist states, particularly Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. A bibliography of Brown’s complete works from the mid-1960s to the present is included.

This book presents a non-cosmopolitan theory of global justice. In contrast to theories that seek to extend principles of social justice, such as equality of opportunity or resources, to the world as a whole, it argues that in a world made up of self-determining national communities, a different conception is needed. The book presents and defends an account of national responsibility which entails that nations may justifiably claim the benefits that their decisions and policies produce, while also being held liable for harms that they inflict on other peoples. Such collective responsibility extends to responsibility for the national past, so the present generation may owe redress to those who have been harmed by the actions of their predecessors. Global justice, therefore, must be understood not in terms of equality, but in terms of a minimum set of basic rights that belong to human beings everywhere. Where these rights are being violated or threatened, remedial responsibility may fall on outsiders. The book considers how this responsibility should be allocated, and how far citizens of democratic societies must limit their pursuit of domestic objectives in order to discharge their global obligations.

The New Kremlinology is the first in-depth examination of the development of regime personalisation in Russia. In the post-Cold War period, many previously democratising countries experienced authoritarian reversals whereby incumbent leaders took over and gravitated towards personalist rule. Scholars have predominantly focused on the authoritarian turn, as opposed to the type of authoritarian rule emerging from it. In a departure from accounts centred on the failure of democratisation in Russia, this book's argument begins from a basic assumption that the political regime of Vladimir Putin is a personalist regime in the making. Focusing on the politics within the Russian ruling coalition since 1999, The New Kremlinology describes the process of regime personalisation, that is, the acquisition of personal power by a leader. Drawing from comparative evidence and theories of personalist rule, the investigation is based on four components of regime personalisation: patronage networks, deinstitutionalisation, media personalisation, and establishing permanency in office. The fact that Russia has gradually acquired many---but not all---of the characteristics associated with a personalist regime, underscores the complexity of political change and that we need to unpack the concept of personalism to understand it better. The lessons of the book extend beyond Russia and illuminate how other personalist and personalising regimes emerge and develop. Furthermore, the title of the book, The New Kremlinology, is chosen to emphasise not only the subject matter, the what, but also the how --- the battery of innovative methods employed to study the black box of non-democratic politics.

What will the next generation of Russian leaders be like? How will they regard the United States, Russia’s place in the world, democracy, free speech, and immigration? What do they think of their current leaders? What sorts of tactics will they bring to international negotiating tables, political and otherwise? This book provides an engaging, intimate, and unprecedented window onto the mindsets of the next generation of leaders in Russian politics, business, and economics in their own words, candidly expressed in focus groups led by a Russian professional. It is a unique opportunity to experience the future leaders’ candor, disappointments, models for the future, and the state of the world. They are students in Russia’s three most elite universities, the training grounds for all of the nation’s leadership. Allowing these students to speak in their own words, it shares their thoughts on international relations, the domestic and international media, democratic movements, and their government. It also shows how their total immersion in the world of the internet—an immersion that sets them apart from the current generation of Russian leadership and much of the rest of the country—frames the way that they think and affects their trust in their leaders, the media, and their colleagues. The book also looks at the nation’s recent protests and nascent political movements to show how they came about and to consider what promise, if any, they might hold for a more democratic Russia.

What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? Across the region, the countries inherited remarkably similar police forces with identical structures, chains of command, and politicized relationships with the political elite. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Based on the analysis of five post-Soviet countries (Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan) that have officially embarked on police reform efforts, the book examines various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing. It develops a new understanding of both police and police reform. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this study defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state’s legitimate use of violence. Police are, according to a common Russian saying, a “mirror of society”—serving as a counterweight to its complexity. Police reform, in turn, is a process of consensus-building on the rationale of the use of violence through discussions, debates, media, and advocacy.

This book inquires into Vladimir Putin’s leadership strategy and relies on social identity theory to explain Putin’s success as a leader. The author argues that Russia’s second president has been successful in promoting his image as an embodiment of the shared national identity of the Russian citizens. He has articulated the shared collective perspective and has built a social consensus by tapping into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation derived from the painful experience of the transition in the 1990s. He was able to overturn these emotions into pride and patriotism by activating two central pillars of the Soviet collective identity: a sense of exceptionalism that the Soviet regime promoted to consolidate the Soviet nation, and a sense of a foreign threat to the state and its people that also was foundational for the Soviet Union. Putin’s assertive foreign policy decisions, culminating in the annexation of Crimea, appeared to have secured, in the eyes of the Russian citizens, their insecure national identity. The top-down leadership and bottom-up collective identity–driven processes coalesced to produce a newly revanchist Russia, with its current leader perceived by many citizens to be irreplaceable. Politics of national identity in Russia are promoted through a well-coordinated media machine that works to focus citizens’ attention on Putin’s foreign policy and on Russia’s international standing. Public fears are played out against the backdrop of Soviet legacies of national exceptionalism and the politics of victimhood associated with the 1990s to conjure a sense of collective dignity, self-righteousness, and national strength to keep the present political system intact.

Conspiracy theories have come to play an increasingly prominent role in political systems around the world. In Revealing Schemes, Scott Radnitz moves beyond psychological explanations for why people believe conspiracy theories to explore the politics surrounding them, placing two questions at the center of his account: What leads regimes to promote conspiracy claims? And what effects do those claims have on politics and society? Focusing on the former Soviet Union—a region of the world where such theories have long thrived—he shows that incumbent politicians tend to make conspiracy claims to demonstrate their knowledge and authority at moments of uncertainty and threat. They emerge more often where there is serious political competition rather than unbridled autocracy and in response to events that challenge a regime’s ability to rule. Yet conspiracy theories can also be habit-forming and persist as part of an official narrative even where immediate threats have subsided—a strategy intended to strengthen regimes, but that may inadvertently undermine them.

Can the internet fundamentally challenge a non-free state such as Russia? The role of social networking in political change in the Middle East and beyond raises important questions about the ability of authoritarian leaders to control the information sphere as well as their subjects. This book goes beyond the idea of “virtual” politics to study five key components in the relationship between the online sphere and society: content, community, catalysts, control, and co-optation. Including an analysis of the internet-linked protests in the winter of 2011–12, this book posits that there are critical preconditions that help the internet to challenge non-free states. Russia experienced explosive growth in the online audience, tipping the balance of control away from state-run television and toward the more open online sphere. Russian leaders became vulnerable to online protest movements and online social entrepreneurs by their failure to control the internet as effectively as they controlled traditional media. In addition, studies of small-scale protests involving health issues and children with disabilities provide compelling evidence that Russians were beginning to translate individual grievances into rising political awareness and efficacy via the online sphere prior to the protests in 2011–12. New types of information dissemination, networking, and protest transformed a state strategy of co-opted elections into a powerful catalyst for protest and demands for rights. While the revolution remains stalled, a new and evolving generation of internet users is showing compelling signs of transforming the public sphere in Russia.

This book refutes the idea that Russia plays a weak hand well in international politics. The book argues instead that Russia under Vladimir Putin’s regime may not be as weak as is sometimes thought in the West. It takes a multidimensional approach in assessing Russian state power in international relations, going beyond metrics of power like relative strength of the economy, human capital, and size of the military, to also include the policy weight or importance of Russian firms and industries, as well as where, geographically, Russian influence has spread globally. The book includes fresh empirical data on the Russian economy, demography and human capital, and conventional military and nuclear weaponry capacities in Russia relative to other great powers like China and the United States. The book argues that realpolitik alone does not explain Russian foreign policy choices under Putin. Rather, Putin’s patronal autocratic regime and the need for social stability play an important role in understanding when and why Russian power is projected in the twenty-first century.

Nearly three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, early hopes for the integration of the post-Soviet states into a “Europe whole and free” seem to have been decisively dashed. Europe itself is in the midst of a multifaceted crisis that threatens the considerable gains of the postwar liberal European experiment. This book provides a panoramic view of the process of “Europeanization” in Russia and all fourteen of the other former Soviet republics since 1989, in a study that is both theoretically grounded (with five chapters that discuss the historical and contemporary meanings of “Europe” in its cultural-civilizational, political, and security guises) and empirically rich (with case studies that examine the question of Europeanization in Russia and each of the other fourteen ex-Soviet republics). It argues that deeply rooted ideas about Europe’s cultural-civilizational primacy and about who “belongs” in Europe, and who doesn’t—and who might be able to “become European” someday, and who definitely cannot—to influence both internal politics in contemporary Europe and the processes of Europeanization in Russia and the former Soviet Union. From the “European dreams” of people in Ukraine and Georgia, who continue to see Europe as a beacon of liberal values, democratic institutions, and economic prosperity, to Russia’s efforts to weaken the postwar European order by presenting an alternative, more ethnonationalist, realist, and revanchist view of “Europe,” it demonstrates the necessity and utility of viewing contemporary Eurasian politics as a struggle over the meaning and practices of “Europeanness.”

The period since Gorbachev came to power has been a tumultuous time for Russia. It has seen the expectations raised by Gorbachev's efforts to bring about change in the Soviet Union dashed, the collapse of the Soviet superpower and the emergence of a new Russian state claiming to base itself on democratic, market principles. It has seen a political system shattered by a president turning tanks against the parliament, and then that president configuring the new political structure to give himself overwhelming power. These political upheavals took place against a background of social dislocation as the Russian people were ravaged by the effects of economic shock therapy. This book analyses this process, showing how the policies of perestroika, glasnost and democratization failed to bring about the renewal Gorbachev sought. It traces how, in the absence of active civil society forces, Yeltsin built up a hegemonic, but unstable, presidential system that sought to concentrate political power in the presidency. It explains how the quest for a market‐based democracy was undermined by the way in which political elites were able to act largely independently of the wishes of the mass of the population. It was this gulf between mass populace and elite political actors that shaped the course of developments under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

This book researches the question of what the Russian Mafia is, and challenges widely held views of its nature. It charts the emergence of the Russian Mafia in the context of the transition to the market, the privatization of protection, and pervasive corruption. The ability of the Russian State to define property rights and protect contracts is compared with the services offered by fragments of the state apparatus, private security firms, ethnic crime groups, the Cossacks and the Russian Mafia. Past criminal traditions, rituals, and norms have been resuscitated by the modern Russian Mafia to forge a powerful new identity and compete in a crowded market for protection. The book draws on and reports from undercover police operations, in-depth interviews conducted over several years with the victims of the Mafia, criminals, and officials, and documents from the Gulag archives. It also provides a comparative study, making references to other mafia in other countries (the Japanese Yakuza, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, American–Italian Mafia and the Hong Kong Triads). The book has an introduction and conclusion and between these is arranged in three parts: I. The Transition to the Market and Protection in Russia (three chapters); II. Private protection in Perm (two chapters investigating the emergence and operation of the mafia in the city of Perm); and III. The Russian Mafia (three chapters).

The USSR was dominated by its ruling Communist Party, and the party was in turn dominated by a political elite that was represented in its Central Committee. Nearly two thousand individuals were members of the Central Committee between 1917 and 1991, who may be divided into four distinct political generations from the professional revolutionaries born in the late nineteenth century to the post‐war generation that was beginning to enter the political elite in the Gorbachev years. There were considerable variations over time in the characteristics of the Central Committee, including the extent to which its membership was replaced at successive party congresses. But a close relationship developed between particular occupational positions and Central Committee membership, a ‘job‐slot’ system that lasted until the final years of communist rule. The Central Committee as an institution was generally marginal to the political process. But it met more frequently and took more decisions in the 1920s and late 1980s, and on several occasions, its meetings were decisive in resolving leadership conflicts; they also ventilated policy alternatives, and sometimes disagreements. In the last years of communist rule, the elite sought increasingly to transform their positions of political power into the more enduring advantage of property, and this allowed many of them to maintain their elite status into the post‐communist period. As well as printed sources, the study draws on recently opened party archives and about a hundred interviews with members of the Brezhnev‐era Central Committee.

The book provides a succinct account of the major periods in evolution of Russia’s strong state construct by reviewing the external and internal contexts of its emergence, progression, and fall in Muscovy, St. Petersburg, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia with an emphasis on the last two decades. Each time a combination of these contexts was distinct thereby producing different political outcomes in Russia. The book argues that a perspective on Russia from a Western viewpoint is limited and that there has been an alternative way of thinking about the nation and its problems. While focusing on contemporary developments of the Russian state, the book situates them in a broader historical context and highlights that the roots of these developments are in the tsar’s autocratic system. Russia’s strong state has evolved and survived throughout centuries and that alone suggests its historical vitality and possible future revival. From this perspective, the central scholarly question is not whether Russia will recreate a strong state but, rather, what kind of a strong state it will be and under which circumstances it is likely to function.