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Symbols are central features of organized human life, helping to define perception, shaping the way we view the world and understand what goes on within it. But, despite this key role in shaping un...

This paper focuses on the way Vladimir Putin has sought to build a power base within Russian politics. This base has rested on two foundations: institutional consolidation and elite management. With regard to the institutional basis, he has relied on the constitutional position of the presidency reinforced by the power vertical, the party of power, and the presidential apparatus. He has sought to manage the elite by means of his personal administrative style within a patrimonial context, the shaping of his popular image, and the reworking of the ideological and policy spheres. The paper concludes that although the resultant power base has been solid until now, there are tensions within it that may make it unsustainable in the long run.

The notion of electoral authoritarianism emerged in the post-cold war world to refer to authoritarian systems that used seemingly democratic electoral means to stabilize non-democratic systems. This was achieved through the production of massive electoral majorities for the ruling party. However an element of uncertainty remains with such elections in that the ruling party may be either defeated or suffer a significant electoral rebuff. Such events are usually seen in terms of the loss of voter support for the party, but as the Russian case shows, this may be better seen as evidence of a basic malfunction of the electoral authoritarian mechanism itself.

Outlines the argument common in the literature that politics at the apex of authoritarian systems like the Soviet is an almost constant state of struggle for power between an individual leader and his colleagues. This is a misleading view, as an understanding of Soviet elite politics will demonstrate. The history of the study of Soviet leadership has tended to be conducted principally through the medium of biography, but although this may tell us a lot about the individual leader, it is deficient in explaining the structures and processes of leadership. This requires an investigation of the norms that underpinned that leadership and structured the way it operated. The chapter concludes by explaining the institutional structure of Soviet leadership politics, and defines the essential terms of the analysis.

Symbols play an important role in the politics of all societies, especially at times of regime change when the symbols of the former regime are subject to three types of process: co-optation, contestation, and disavowal. An important symbol in post-communist Russia has been the body of Vladimir Lenin and, in particular, debate over whether it should remain in the mausoleum where it currently lies or whether it should be buried. Public opinion poll data throw some light on this, and enable us to evaluate the role that Lenin's body plays in contemporary politics in terms of notions of identity, legitimation, chronology and morality.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, despite the continued presence of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires in Eastern Europe and the diversity of small states in what would become Germany and Italy, the territorial state was becoming the dominant political actor in Europe. Increasingly central government was becoming more complex, especially in the non-absolutist states where the Court played a much more restricted role. However, the state’s capacity to project central rule into the localities remained limited. The infrastructure did not exist to enable the construction of a bureaucratic hierarchy extending deep into society. Similarly, in constitutional England, where central rule relied upon the cooperation of local notables tied to the centre by ideology and the Parliament, the institutional means did not exist for the exercise of intrusive controls by the centre or for a coherent process of interdependence between state and society. In the nineteenth century the means that would enable both of these would begin to be built. This was associated with the rise of industrialization.

The role of the state was paramount during the twentieth century. The conditions within which millions of people lived were shaped by the state, the role it sought to pursue, and the ability it had to pursue that role. The centrality of the state is evident as soon as we look at some of the most important developments of that century. In the communist countries, states forced through rapidly-paced programmes of societal transformation that turned (in one case) a backward, partly industrialized society into a nuclear superpower within 40 years. In the capitalist West, the post-war long boom characterized by the highest and most sustained living standards ever achieved by large populations was underpinned by state expenditure policies and the construction of the welfare state. In parts of the Third World, weak states — and in some cases kleptocratic states — were instrumental in the continuation of widespread poverty, disease, low living standards, violence and war. More than in any other century, people’s lives everywhere on the globe were affected by the successes and failings of states.

An essential part of building an authoritarian polity is the structuring of public political activity in such a way as to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition that could challenge the regime. This first dimension of rule involves what in Russia has been called the “nonsystemic” (meaning non-electoral) opposition, and the “systemic” opposition, which involves the electoral process more narrowly. This chapter will focus on the way in which the restriction of the nonsystemic opposition began under Yeltsin, before becoming more systematic under Putin. Following discussion of mechanisms for the regulation of potential and real opposition activity, the focus will then shift to the arenas in which such mechanisms were deployed in Russia to block opportunities for opposition to mobilize against the regime. The popular mobilization of 1988–91 provided a basis upon which many had hoped a new democratic political structure would be built. Not only did such activity create a rudimentary structure for political activism in the form of autonomous organizations, parties, and elected assemblies, but it also gave a sense of legitimacy to such activity that had been lacking during the Soviet period. That legitimacy was bolstered by the democratic rhetoric of the post-Soviet period. However, in retrospect, it is clear that the prospects for democracy were much less rosy than this might suggest. The emergent political parties were generally weak, had little effective organization or resources, and usually lacked a consistent ideology to provide a sense of unity and commitment. As Chapter 1 explains, the elite-centered nature of the transition meant there was little scope for meaningful participation in political life for those bodies, which might have encouraged their institutional development, while the absence of a clear commitment to an early election in the initial period of Russian independence meant that party development could not be stimulated by the need to organize for electoral competition. As Chapter 3 shows, the result was that democratic forces in the party arena remained weak and ill organized. Moreover, the apparent strength of popular mobilization evident in 1990–91 hid the fact that in Russia this was largely confined to Moscow and was generally unable to sustain itself in the face of serious economic downturn. With the end of the Soviet Union, the drive seemed to leach out of popular mobilization as people concentrated on their more immediate problems of daily survival.

The political trajectories of the post-Soviet states are varied, with democracy being the outcome in only a minority of these countries. The differ- ent outcomes are striking, given the similarity of starting points. The key to under- standing a democratic outcome lies in the different relationships between old regime elites and civil society-based opposition forces, and the ethnic balance in the country. Nationalism, reflected in the popular front movements, was crucial for a democratic outcome.

Many observers have pointed to the increasingly authoritarian nature of President Putin's regime in Russia. This apparent turn away from democracy has generally been attributed either to Russian political culture or to the security background of Putin himself and many of those he has brought to office. However, analysis of the democratization literature suggests that the sources of Russia's authoritarianism may lie in the nature of the initial transition from Soviet rule, and in particular the way in which elites were able to act with significant independence from civil society forces because of the weakness of such forces. This weakness enabled successive elites led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin to construct a political system in which popularly based involvement and participation were severely restricted. In this sense, Putin is merely building on what went before, not changing the regime's basic trajectory.

One of the most important problems confronting a new regime is the generation of a sense of its legitimacy. This is crucial for its survival and long-term stability. One of the key aspects of this is through the manipulation of symbols. Through their ability to capture the moment, to reduce complex events to more simplistic and understandable cameos and thereby to establish meaning, to provoke passions of fervent commitment (and, among some, violent opposition), and more generally their ability simply to represent complex ideas and events and embed them within the popular consciousness and culture, symbols can facilitate an acceptance of the new regime and what it stands for. Symbols can legitimate action and belief and, by helping to define many of the collective values that underpin the community, help to identify the bounds of the society and the principles by which it is governed. Overwhelmingly, political symbolism legitimates the regime's power structure.' Accordingly, when a regime falls, its successor will be anxious to replace the symbolic culture of the fallen regime by a new one better suited to its ends. The generation of new symbols like flags, coats of arms, and anthems, the destruction of old and construction of new monuments, the creation of new rituals or the injection of new content into existing rituals, and even the reworking of the language (through the injection of new words, the changing of the meaning of existing terms, and the elimination of some words) in order to invest it with a new ethos have all been important to the creation of a new regime's symbolic culture. A central component of the creation of a new symbolic culture is the renaming of street and place names. These are important because they combine a geographical sense of direction and place with an intellectual, perhaps even ideological, sense of direction and place. Functionally, place names enable people to locate themselves within a landscape and avoid getting lost. Intellectually, place names that are linked to the symbolic universe

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a range of policy dilemmas for the Russian government in both domestic and foreign affairs. In the latter, Russian policy has gone through a number of phases. The initially rather supine attitude Russia adopted toward the West in the early years of Yeltsin’s presidency changed somewhat, following the replacement of Alexander Kozyrev as foreign minister by Evgenii Primakov in January 1996, when a more independent stance became evident in Russian policy. But the real change came following the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000. Increased attention was devoted to the former states of the USSR and to Asia than had been evident earlier, and Russia became more assertive with regard to its basic interests, especially in terms of its relationship with the West. However although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued a number of ‘Foreign Policy Concepts’ outlining a framework for Russian foreign policy (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2013; earlier such documents appeared in 1993 and 2008). There has been no clear articulation of an ideology or vision that might provide an intellectual rationale to underpin the foreign policy process. This is in sharp contrast to the situation that had applied in the USSR when a developed meta-narrative had provided this sort of intellectual underpinning (Gill, 2011).

The early aspirations for democracy in post‐Soviet Russia have not been realised. The principal reason for this is that the elites which dominated the initial post‐Soviet period constructed a political system which effectively dosed off entry to the mass of the populace and to civil society organisations. But the system Yeltsin created, with a powerful presidency resting on charismatic legitimation, a weakened legislature, and ineffective parties, was not stable. Vladimir Putin has tried to remedy this by building a more integrated and coherent power structure with himself at the apex But this is no more democratic than that of Yeltsin. Political elites thereby remain the principal barrier to Russia's democratic development

The author of this book, a former correspondent in Moscow, has written a powerful critique of Russia under Vladimir Putin. His thesis is that in the early 2000s, on the back of reaction against the...

THE PROSPECTS FOR DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA REMAIN ONE OF THE MOST compelling questions both for scholarly analysis and in international politics. But in attempting to survey the prospects for a democratic future in post-communist Russia, all too often we are blinded by the dramas of the moment. Conflict between president and legislature, the success first of Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party and then of the communists in successive legislative elections, the Chechen war and the president's health – are all issues which have tended to crowd out analysis of more long-term structural considerations which will underpin the course of future Russian development. These major events in the day-today life of Russian politics can have a significant effect upon such development, but a focus upon them exclusively risks not only missing the importance of the deeper structural factors, but also misunderstanding the context within which these events occur. These events are shaped fundamentally by the structures which underpin the political system: broad structural changes within the society will give shape to the arena within which political activity takes place.

A basic task of the state is to ensure the continuation and security of the community within which it is found. In an attempt to achieve this, state elites pursue long-term strategies. Such strategies involve not just questions of external security, but also the structuring of domestic society with an eye to faciliting the extraction and mobilisation of resources. The tsarist state sought to achieve this through a cooptive strategy which left some room for independent economic initiative. The soviet elite sought to encapsulate all actors into a single command stucture, thereby removing all scope for independent activity. Ultimately both strategies failed, and the post-Soviet leaders are faced with the problem of devising a more successful alternative.

One of the principal challenges facing political science is understanding and explaining the changes occurring in the Soviet Union/Russia after 1985. This article argues that two concepts taken from the transition to democracy literature, liberalization and democratization, are useful for understanding the dynamics of change in this region. It argues that a policy of liberalization stimulated a process of liberalization, which in turn generated a process of democratization. However, this has not been carried through to its conclusion because of the circumstances prevailing within the political elite and because of the weakness of mass forces favouring a full‐blooded process of democratization.

A mature socialism? Stalin's death removed the charismatic principal of what had become the keystone of the Soviet metanarrative and that which had mediated the diverse strands of Soviet symbolism, and thereby given them a degree of coherence. With him gone, it was not clear how the tensions between these symbolic elements of the metanarrative could be resolved. One potential answer was to treat Stalin the way Lenin initially had been treated, viz. to emphasise his writings and his actions as the indelible guide to the future against which all must be measured. But this approach was eschewed from the outset. Although Stalin was buried with full pomp and ceremony in what became the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum on Red Square, in the days after his death there was a dramatic shift away from the imagery of the vozhd; his picture, his words, and references to him were no longer everywhere in the Soviet public sphere, as they had been during his life. The charismatic legitimation that formerly had been vested in the figure of the vozhd was now the subject of an attempt to shift it onto the party. This was reflected in the announcement of Stalin's death, which declared that the ‘peoples of our country unite even more closely in our great fraternal family, under the tested leadership of the Communist Party created and fostered by Lenin and Stalin.’ It also referred to ‘the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin’.

The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 ushered into existence a new type of political system very different from any which had preceded it. The innovative thing about this new system was the place that the ruling Communist Party occupied in it.1 The party was dominant in the system. Its branches were found in all organizations in the USSR, its members were meant to exercise leading and guiding authority in all of those organizations, and throughout the society in general, and its leadership made all of the most important decisions for the Soviet state. It was clearly the most influential institutional body in the Soviet system. But throughout its life as the ruling institution of the Soviet Union, the party suffered from a basic tension within the rules, norms and procedures that were designed to structure the way the party worked.

Paths to Democracy: Revolution and Totalitarianism. By Rosemary H. T. O'Kane. New York: Routledge, 2004. 288p. $110.00 cloth, $33.95 paper.In this book, Rosemary O'Kane seeks to restore a political dimension to the comparative historical analysis of paths to democracy. Reacting against the focus upon social structure that has been so prominent in the analysis of democratic and nondemocratic regime trajectories, she attempts to provide an explanation of the paths to the contemporary situations of three countries, France, Germany, and Russia. She argues that these cases contrast with one another in ways that help to illuminate a range of hypotheses generally accepted about the relationship between democracy, on the one hand, and such variables as economic crisis, economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization, on the other. In broad terms, she sees the cases contrasting in the following ways: Russia contrasts with France and Germany in respect to democracy, Germany with France and Russia in respect to revolution, and France with Germany and the Soviet Union in respect to totalitarianism.

The key to the modern state form is the capacity it possesses as a result of the combination of internal centralization and discipline on the one hand and interdependence on the other. However, such a combination has not always been in evidence, with the practical effect that where such a combination has been absent or one or both elements have been weakly developed, states have lacked capacity on the scale of the modern state. This is clearly evident if we look at the ancient state, the first form in which the state became stabilized as the dominant, continuing force in society. While the degree of institutional sophistication of individual ancient states varied considerably, all shared a weakness of capacity stemming from flawed centralization and low levels of interdependence.

The ancient state remained infrastructurally weak and possessing limited capacity. These characteristics were principally because of the limited development of a coherent, well-organized bureaucratic infrastructure and the narrow basis of organic interdependence enjoyed by the state. In feudal and early modern times, major attempts were made to overcome these weaknesses as the national state developed as the principal political form in Western Europe. There were two basic models of state-building in the most successful states: organic and overarching.

While the development of the state has thus far been discussed in terms primarily of domestic forces, the international context has also been important. Geopolitical competition, and especially war, has often been seen as playing a significant role in state development. But the international context also includes the broader relationship between Western Europe and the rest of the world, most especially Asia. This raises the question of the non-European state and claims about both the uniqueness and superiority of the Western state form.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the modern state seemed to have become the dominant form of organization on the globe. All states, including former imperialists, former colonies and those never engaged in the imperial adventure, seemed to be adopting the broad outlines of the state as it developed in Western Europe. Even the communist states shared many of the forms of the Western liberal democratic state. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, the nature of the ongoing process of globalization changed. Instead of being associated with the territorial state, it became deterritorialized, and thereby has been seen by many to threaten the state’s very existence. Thus just when it had appeared to become dominant, the state appeared under mortal threat. How real are such fears?

The twentieth century saw the expansion of the state to its greatest limits, penetrating further into society and controlling more of the lives of the people who lived under it than ever before. The principal form this took in the West was the capitalist welfare state; in the East, the communist state. Linked with this was a change in the state’s formal relationship with the people over whom it ruled, a change reflected in the rise of democratic politics and the designation of those people as ‘citizens’. Both the development of the state and the rise of citizenship continued trends begun as a result of industrialization and discussed in Chapter 4. These changes embedded the state more firmly into society than it had ever been before and, in the welfare (but not communist) states, strengthened the ties of interdependence.

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.

The study of the third wave,1 embodied in the ‘transition literature’, has conceptualized the course of regime change in terms of three phases: regime breakdown, democratic transition, and democratic consolidation. Breakdown involves the deconstruction and possibly disintegration of the old regime, transition is the shift from old structures and processes to new, and consolidation is when those structures and processes have become stabilized and so embedded in the collective consciousness of the society that they gain normative authority. These phases are logically, but not always temporally, distinct; all three phases overlap, even if the forces driving them are not the same. This is clearest in the case of regime breakdown and transition. With domestic political forces the main actors in the third wave of democratization, that process was a zero sum game; democratic forces could not be successful without the withdrawal or collapse of authoritarian power. This does not mean that the two processes, the collapse of authoritarian rule and the establishment of a democratic regime, are the same; the breakdown of authoritarian rule does not inevitably lead to a democratic polity, and historically most cases of authoritarian collapse have spawned further authoritarian regimes.

The literature on transition to and consolidation of democracy emerged as an attempt to explain developments in Latin America and Southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the case studies come from these two regions, and most exponents of this literature, if they had a regional specialism, were specialists in one or a number of countries of these regions. However, the most spectacular, because of its range, unexpectedness and geopolitical power of the subjects, instance of democratization occurred in neither of these two regions, but in the former Communist world of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The issue this raised was whether the sorts of explanations that had come out of the transition literature could usefully be applied to the Communist-post-Communist situation. Some sought to use this literature in their analyses of communist transitions1 while others believed that the Southern European and Latin American experiences were so different that they could not spawn a useful explanatory literature for these other cases.

The course of democratic transition, ideally, gives way to the third stage in the process, democratic consolidation. Although there have been differing conceptions of consolidation depending upon what analysts saw to be its specific purpose, to prevent the decay or erosion back to authoritarian rule or to build a qualitatively better democratic system,1 the basic understanding of what consolidation is about has been widely agreed. The notion of consolidation refers to the embedding of democratic procedures into the infrastructure as a whole so that that system is secure and is generally seen as the appropriate way of organizing political life. In the words of two scholars, a consolidated democracy is ‘a regime that meets all the procedural criteria of democracy and also in which all politically significant groups accept established political institutions and adhere to democratic rules of the game.’2 A regime is therefore said to be consolidated when it is seen as ‘the only game in town’,3 when no alternative methods of organizing politics are seen as appropriate replacements of the democratic process. This does not mean that, once consolidated, a democracy will remain stable and firmly in place for ever. Like any regime, a consolidated democracy can break down, but it should be more immune from that process than an unconsolidated democracy would be.