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Authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China are skillfully puffing themselves up to appear more economically, politically, and militarily powerful than they actually are—in particular, by presenting an outsized image of their ability to influence the politics of other countries. The success of this "authoritarian inflation" is clearly visible in Europe, the United States, and beyond. Distorted perceptions of authoritarian potency damage democratic confidence and help Russia and China to exert real influence, which turn undermines Western values and institutions. If left unchallenged, these false perceptions will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the research on diasporic and migrant communities' engagement the democratisation of their home countries. It focuses on the case of the most recent wave of political emigration from Russia that has taken place during President Putin's third term. It confirms the thesis that emigration, particularly forced emigration, whereby political dissidents are squeezed out from their country by the authorities in hopes of calming simmering political protest, has stopped being the safety valve it once was. Drawing on Levitt's seminal work on social remittances, it analyses the content and channels of political remittances by recent Russian emigrants. In terms of the democratic remittances' content, six main broadly defined thematic areas of mobilisation can be distinguished: free and fair elections; human rights and civil freedoms; fighting corruption; environmental protection; anti-war activities; counteracting Russian propaganda and the 'hybrid war'. The channels of these democratic remittances are divided into direct (activities targeted at the Russian society) and indirect ones (targeted at Russian diaspora and political elites and society in the receiving countries). It draws the attention to immeasurable political remittances, those which cannot be easily assessed, yet undeniably impact the country of origin and its society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian government has claimed that the Western powers promised at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO, but later reneged on that promise. Most former officials in the West, and many scholars as well, have denied that this was the case; but other scholars, along with a handful of former officials, believe that promises to that effect were, in fact, made in 1990. So who is right? The question still has political importance: how it is answered has bearing on how we should feel about NATO expansion and, indeed, about the United States' post–Cold War policy more generally. So it makes sense to stand back and try to see where the truth lies. An examination of the debate in light of the evidence—especially evidence that the participants themselves have presented—leads to the conclusion that the Russian allegations are by no means baseless, which affects how the U.S.-Russian relationship today is to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of and current relations (as of 2019) between Russia and Lebanon. Topics discussed include business deals between the Russian natural gas producer Novatek and the Lebanese government, the substantial Christian community in Lebanon and the network of religious and secular organizations formed to lobby for Moscow's interests in Lebanon by President Vladimir Putin. The author reports that Russia's growing influence in the country is worrying to some Lebanese politicians. The political and social climate in Syria is also examined.

The author asserts that the Russian state is incoherent and that the increasing authoritarian government should not repeat the mistakes of the old Soviet Union. Topics discussed include the rise of bureaucracy in the elite class, forms of resistance from Russians although they do not actively protest, and parallel processes that make an incoherent Russian state including the government's withdrawal from its social protector role, state paternalism and the exploitation of ordinary people.

How to cope with the end of utopia? How to move from making history on a day-to-day basis to capitalizing on a legend? That is the dilemma Russian veterans of the Donbas insurgency have faced since the exalting atmosphere of Novorossiya faded away. In this article, I trace the transformations of the Novorossiya utopia from the point at which Russian volunteer fighters began to return to Russia and found themselves compelled to reinvent themselves in a new context. I first look at the difficult reconversion from war to politics of Donbas heroes such as Igor Strelkov and Aleksandr Borodai and how their efforts to launch new structures based on their war legitimacy have succeeded or failed. I then turn to investigate the birth of new heroes, such as the writer Zakhar Prilepin, who wave the metaphorical flag of Donbas at a time when exaltation of the war has declined. After that, I explore how Novorossiya has become a literature genre that occupies the shelves of Russian bookstores, spanning from Novorossievedenie —the "science of Novorossiya"—to the rich subgenre of war memoirs and veteran diaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the symbolic politics of three pro-state movements that emerged from the "preventive counterrevolution" launched by the Kremlin in response to Ukraine's Orange Revolution. In 2005, youth movement Nashi played upon war memory at its rallies and branded the opposition "fascist"; in 2012, the Anti-Orange Committee countered opposition protests with mass gatherings at Moscow's war commemoration sites; in 2015, Antimaidan brought thousands onto Russia's streets to denounce US-backed regime change and alleged neo-Nazism in Kiev. I show how evocation of the enemy image, through reference to the war experience, played a key role in the symbolism of the preventive counterrevolution. Interviews with activists in these movements discussing their symbolic politics reveal an opposing victim/victor narrative based on an interplay of two World War II myths—the "Great Victory" and the "fascist threat." Moving beyond approaches that view the Soviet and Russian World War II cult as a triumphalist narrative of the Great Victory over fascism, I conclude that its threat component is an understudied element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores protest tactics in Russian cities, stressing the liminality of spatial contestation practices. In this authoritarian context, spatial contestation typically has a liminal character, where citizens employ strategic ambiguity of their actions vis‐á‐vis (a) legal regulations, (b) official discourse, and (c) transcripts of legitimate behaviour. Showing how urbanites develop creative and subversive infrapolitical forms of resistance, the article contributes an analysis of the ways in which public space in the city can be appropriated from below, temporary protest communities formed and active citizenship claimed under non‐democratic regime conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom says that autocrats manipulate news through censorship. But when it comes to economic affairs—a highly sensitive topic for modern autocrats—the government's ability to censor information effectively is limited, because citizens can benchmark the official news against their incomes, market prices, and other observables. We propose that instead of censoring economic facts, the media tactically frames those facts to make the government appear as a competent manager. Using a corpus of daily news reports from Russia's largest state-owned television network, we document extensive evidence supporting this prediction. Bad news is not censored, but it is systematically blamed on external factors, whereas good news is systematically attributed to domestic politicians. Such selective attribution is used more intensely in politically sensitive times (elections and protests) and when the leadership is already enjoying high popular support—consistent with the existing theories of information manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the political condition in Russia in the year 2000. Cooperation between the executive and legislative branch of the government of Russia; Information on the political parties in Russia; Leaders of the major political movements of Russia.

This article analyses post-Soviet Russian nation building through examining the contradictions of 'ethnic' and 'civic' nation building processes. In so doing, this paper argues Shevel's (2011) characterization of post-Soviet Russia's nation-building as 'purposefully ambiguous', further discussing the legal framework of Russia's nation building and contemporary policies of the Russian government. As a result, this article proposes to characterize post-Soviet Russian nation building as a 'sufficiently flexible' combination of controversial ethnic and civic nationalisms with 'a Russian flavour'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elite cohesion is a fundamental pillar of authoritarian stability. High-level defections can signal weakness, embolden the opposition, and sometimes, lead to regime collapse. Using a dataset of 4,291 ruling party candidates in Russia, this paper develops and tests hypotheses about the integrity of elite coalitions under autocracy. Our theory predicts that ruling elites defect when there is greater uncertainty about the regime's willingness to provide spoils. Regimes that share power with the opposition, limit access to spoils, and lack formal institutions see more defections. Co-opting the opposition assuages outside threats but leaves regime insiders disgruntled and prone to defection. Those with personal followings and business connections are the most likely to defect, since they can pursue their political goals independently of the regime. Taken together, our results highlight important tradeoffs among authoritarian survival strategies. Many of the steps autocrats take to repel challenges simultaneously heighten the risk of defections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does decentralization affect how voters attribute blame for poor economic performance? This question is particularly important in authoritarian regimes, where economic performance legitimacy is a key source of regime stability. Using political and economic data from large Russian cities for 2003–12, we investigate how replacing direct mayoral elections with appointments affects the way voters attribute blame for economic outcomes. We find that the ruling party is more likely to be punished for poor economic performance in cities with centrally appointed mayors than it is in cities with elected mayors. This research suggests that having locally elected officials may help electoral authoritarian regimes deflect responsibility for some unfavorable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Khrushchev to Putin, Soviet and Russian political leaders have determined who governs the Russian regions. A comparison of all 791 regional leaders who led the current 83 Russian regions between 1957 and 2018 finds that locals, through their origins and prior careers, have made the major difference in centerperiphery relations in Russia since 1991. Currently, these local regional leaders are the political legacy of the Boris Yeltsin presidency. A significant decline in the number of locals serving as regional leaders is also the most likely change to be sought by President Putin in his efforts to eradicate the Yeltsin legacy and attain even greater political dominance over Russia in his fourth term (2018-2024). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the effects of performance incentives given to appointed officials based on their economic accomplishments on the competitiveness of authoritarian regimes.

This article discusses how the discursively and culturally constructed "Russian world" intersects and communicates with the "Turkic world" as an adjacent—and in some respects alternative—civilisational construct. The object of our analysis is the Russian world in situations of multiple encounters with Turkic world in regions that might be termed cultural crossroads. The research is based on two cases of Tatarstan and Adjara, regions possessing a certain degree of administrative autonomy (that is evidently always a matter of bargaining with the centres, Moscow and Tbilisi correspondingly) and cultural authenticity. Both regions can be discussed as hybrid meeting points of different narratives, imageries and representations rooted in the overlapping and competing concepts of Russian and Turkic worlds. The two cases can be compared to each other, firstly, due to their close associations with the multiple spaces of the Russian world. Tatarstan is a republic within Russia with an almost equal balance of ethnic Russians and Tatars, while Adjara contacts the Russian world mostly through Russian mass culture, tourism, and the religion promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and venerated by its Georgian counter-part. Secondly, both regions are homes to sizeable Muslim communities that to a significant extent are sensitive to (though not necessarily shared completely) ideas of pan-Turkic identity and solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their nostalgia for the Cold War, Western elites may be trying to revive the comforting ghosts of the past to cope with a frightening present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the failure of a Russian middle class to emerge and thrive following the fall of the Soviet Union. It cites the destruction of aristocracy and the creation of institutions and policies that provided a high degree of social mobility in Russia starting in 1991. It also examines how education created economic opportunities for Russians, as well as the manner in which oligarchs transformed their political capital into new forms of advantage.

The article argues that the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his system of rule is not the inevitable product of Russian history, geography, and culture. It describes how the decades before Putin's ascension to power departed radically from Russian traditions in both internal and external policy. The article also suggests that Putin's system of rule called Putinism will not survive after the end of his term.

The common conception of Russian politics as an elite game of rent-seeking and autocratic management masks a great deal of ‘mundane’ policymaking, and few areas of social and economic activity have escaped at least some degree of reform in recent years. This article takes a closer look at four such reform attempts - involving higher education, welfare, housing and regional policy - in an effort to discern broad patterns governing how and when the state succeeds or fails. The evidence suggests that both masses and mid-level elites actively defend informality - usually interpreted in the literature as an agent-led response to deinstitutionalization and the breakdown of structure - creating a strong brake on state power. More than a quarter century into the post-Soviet period, this pattern of “aggressive immobility” - the purposeful and concerted defense by citizens of a weakly institutionalized state - has in fact become an entrenched, structural element in Russian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1990s, the Russian public held overwhelmingly favorable attitudes toward the United States; in recent years, attitudes toward the United States have been overwhelmingly unfavorable. Analysts often trace this dramatic change to (1) the emergence of Russian-American conflicts such as those in former Yugoslavia and (2) Russian leaders' attempts to escape blame for their country's failures by attributing them to a powerful external enemy. We point to another major factor of Russian anti-Americanism that preceded the international conflicts and the government-led anti-American propaganda: (3) disillusionment, or an emotional and ideological dissatisfaction with the outcome of pro-Western reforms that started among the liberal elites and then spread among the general public. Using data from the New Russian Barometer surveys, we analyze the dynamics of attitudes toward the United States from 1993 to 2009. We find that mass disappointment in the perestroika outcomes preceded the spread of anti-Americanism in Russia and that anti-American sentiment was stronger and occurred earlier among the elite than among the mass public. Furthermore, those (especially better-educated) people who express disappointment with the outcomes of pro-Western reforms prove significantly more anti-American. Our findings illustrate a general ideological phenomenon that may explain the growth of anti-Americanism in unsuccessful democracies worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's view on the gubernatorial turnover in Russia from 2005-2012. She mentions the significant authority of governors over economics and politics in their area making the turnover attract the attention of the public and elites. She also notes the plan of President Vladimir Putin in eliminating direct gubernatorial elections despite its impact on the role of the country as a federation.

Describes how speaker of the Russian parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov, and other one-time Boris Yeltsin supporters plan to land on their feet. Belief in the parliamentary form of government; Khasbulatov prefers a slow, careful implementation of reform by stages; Disagreement over who should possess supreme power in Russia; Khasbulatov's direct attack on Yeltsin; What he hopes to achieve.

Contends that after changing the flags at the White House (the nickname for the headquarters of the Russian Supreme Soviet, Moscow), the Supreme Soviet stopped its democratic activities and turned back to the old regime. Nostalgia for the heady days after the failed coup; Russian character will not accept the idea it is impossible to change things overnight; Government promises; Redefining Russia; Chameleons; Hardship, unemployment, and the freebie; New cultural buds.