Who is this Vladimir Putin? Who is this man who suddenly--overnight and without warning--was handed the reigns of power to one of the most complex, formidable, and volatile countries in the world? How can we trust him if we don't know him? First Person is an intimate, candid portrait of the man who holds the future of Russia in his grip. An extraordinary compilation of over 24 hours of in-depth interviews and remarkable photographs, it delves deep into Putin's KGB past and explores his meteoric rise to power. No Russian leader has ever subjected himself to this kind of public examination of his life and views. Both as a spy and as a virtual political unknown until selected by Boris Yeltsin to be Prime Minister, Putin has been regarded as man of mystery. Now, the curtain lifts to reveal a remarkable life of struggles and successes. Putin's life story is of major importance to the world.
Securitising Russia shows the impact of twenty-first century security concerns on the way Russia is ruled. It demonstrates how President Putin has wrestled with terrorism, immigration, media freedom, religious pluralism, and economic globalism, and argues that fears of a return to old-style authoritarianism oversimplify the complex context of contemporary Russia. The book focuses on the internal security issues common to many states in the early twenty-first-century, and places them in the particular context of Russia.
How should the West deal with Putin’s Russia? For the U.S. and some European powers the answer is obvious: isolate Russia with punishing economic sanctions, remove it from global institutions such as the G8, and arm the nations directly threatened by Putin. In short, return to the Cold War doctrine that froze Soviet aggression in Europe and helped bring about the collapse of communist Russia. Others argue that such a policy is a dead end. Putin’s Russia has legitimate grievances against Western and NATO powers meddling in its sphere of influence. Instead of further antagonizing Putin and risking a dangerous escalation of the current conflict, the U.S. and Europe should seek common cause with Russia to address shared threats, from the Middle East to Asia to combatting terrorism. In the fifteenth semi-annual Munk Debate, acclaimed academic Stephen F. Cohen and veteran journalist and bestselling author Vladimir Poznar square off against internationally renowned expert on Russian history Anne Applebaum and Russian-born political dissident Garry Kasparov to debate the future of the West’s relationship with Russia.
This book studies the cultural, societal, and ideological factors absent from popular discourse on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, contesting the misleading mainstream assumption that Putin is the all-powerful sovereign of Russia. In carefully examining the ideological underpinnings of Putinism—its tsarist and Soviet elements, its intellectual origins, its culturally reproductive nature, and its imperialist foreign policy—the authors reveal that an indoctrinating ideology and a willing population are simultaneously the most crucial yet overlooked keys to analyzing Putin’s totalitarian democracy. Because Putinism is part of a global wave of extreme political movements, the book also reaffirms the need to understand—but not accept—how and why nation-states and masses turn to nationalism, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism in modern times.
This book integrates Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history into a coherent whole by focusing on the culture, role models, habits and behavior patterns that provide continuity between various political regimes, systems, and rulers from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin. The unifying theme of all these periods is the central question of identity – how the Russians have defined themselves, their country, and their values. Why did the Bolsheviks try to erase any trace of Old Russia and with what did they try to replace it? Why did Stalin wipe out the kulaks and the old Bolsheviks? What were the political consequences of the Great Patriotic War on the Russians as people? When post-Stalin Russia slowly weakened and gave way to the humanism and Westernization that led to the collapse of the Soviet system, why did the 1990s generate a resurgence of anti-western nationalism? And how to explain the slow and steady break with the West under President Putin? This will be a core textbook for undergraduate and graduate students of Russian and European history, and a valuable text for all those interested in how the Russian past influenced and shaped current politics, and in the international East–West divide in particular.
Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.
In 1991, Vladimir Yakunin, a Soviet diplomat and KGB officer, returned from his posting in New York to a country that no longer existed. The state that he had served for all his adult life had been dissolved, the values he knew abandoned. Millions of his compatriots suffered as their savings disappeared and their previously secure existences were threatened by an unholy combination of criminality, corruption and chaos. Others thrived amid the opportunities offered in the new polity, and a battle began over the direction the fledgling state should take. While something resembling stability was won in the early 2000s, today Russia's future remains unresolved; its governing class divided. The Treacherous Path is Yakunin's account of his own experiences on the front line of Russia's implosion and eventual resurgence, and of a career – as an intelligence officer, a government minister and for ten years the CEO of Russia's largest company – that has taken him from the furthest corners of this incomprehensibly vast and complex nation to the Kremlin's corridors. Tackling topics as diverse as terrorism, government intrigue and the reality of doing business in Russia, and offering unparalleled insights into the post-Soviet mindset, this is the first time that a figure with Yakunin's background has talked so openly and frankly about his country.
Demonstrates how the emergence of private property and a market economy after the Soviet Union's collapse enabled a degree of freedom while simultaneously supporting authoritarianism.
This title was first published in 2001. This study attempts to present a broad picture of political, economic and social developments in Russia at the start of the 21st century. It provides an overview of the legacy of the Yeltsin era and attempts to outline major limitations and policy choices that Putin is facing. The book contains an in-depth analysis of power stuggles in Russia, the background to Vladimir Putin's rise to presidency, the role of oligarchs and other pressure groups in Russia. There is also a focus on economic, social and financial developments in Russia, with an overview of Russian foreign, military and social policies, as well as looking at its level of development when compared with other countries.
The future of energy relations between Russia and the West can hardly be separated from the global energy environment. Recent nationalist trends in Russian politics make it very hard to imagine that Russia will abandon a tempting "energy egoism" path (egoism is traditionally central to the Russian nationalist vision of the world) as resource nationalism becomes the dominant policy trend among the group of energy-rich countries. The only event with the potential to change that attitude is the true re-democratization of Russia, followed by the transfer of power to a more internationally responsible and cooperative government. Such a scenario would give Russia and the West an opportunity to boost cross-border energy relationships by harmonizing energy policy approaches and removing barriers and to build a solid long-term energy partnership based on principles of open trade, open investment, rule of law, and de-politicization of energy relations.
In this book, Vladimir Gel’man considers bad governance as a distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly intentionally because the political leaders of these countries establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their own self-interests. Gel’man considers bad governance as a primarily agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days, bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are short and the external constraints on their behavior are not especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives. Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel’man discusses the logic of building and maintaining the politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative perspective.
This final book is the last of a trilogy devoted to the mentality of the Russian people. The first book - "The Price Russians Pay" (2014) gives an idea of what was of value to the people living in Russia, their achievements and failures, what was the cost of wars, revolutions, terror and perestroika. In the second book - "Putin: A Shackled President" (2017), I tried to cover the notion of the Russian mentality "from below," from the position of a private person - in many respects a typical representative of the Russian population - the country's president, Vladimir Putin. It turned out to be a psycho-graphic description of the personality of a prominent, strong-willed person who has already had a strong influence on the development of modern Russia for eighteen years. I tried to show the nature of the national character through one private person. If we proceed from the current state of human civilization, then we can assume that each nation has its own potential for self-development. This potential determines the possibility of the movement of the nation forward along the path of industrial and socio-political progress. Most of the authoritarian harsh regimes have this potential low, it is incomparably more democratic. However, forcibly overthrowing the authoritarian regime from within or from outside, imposing new values on the people, to which it is not yet psychologically ripe, does not always work for the benefit of the people. To describe the Russian mentality, I used the term "values." Values are stable psychological cognitive-emotional processes. Values include needs, goals and attitudes. At present, not the ancient Russian values-archetypes determine the thinking and behavior of Russians, but those values that replaced them, the values that new leaders, transformers-technocrats and visionaries-humanitarians introduce into the consciousness of the people. I devoted my book to studying the values that resulted from this implementation. I singled out in a Russian man exactly twelve values: four of them - basic, eight - auxiliary, socio-psychological. In my opinion, they all fit into the concept of modern Russian mentality. Someone will find this list incomplete. Feel free to add to the list. In my review, the basic values are presented as those that force Russian people to aspire to meaningful action. These are motivational values. They are: 1) Private property 2) Power as a substitute for property 3) The image of an external enemy 4) The image of the inner enemy Socio-psychological values are presented in the form of scales. I would not want to offend anyone by sticking labels, and I did it this way. The reader can decide at which point in the scale he or she belongs as a representative of the Russian people. These scales included: 1) The Scale of Dignity, 2) The scale of Russian Will, 3) The scale of Legal Nihilism, 4) The Scale of Exposure to Verbal Conventions, 5) The Scale of Simulation, 6) The Scale of Honesty, 7) The scale of Trust, 8) The scale of Conservativeness. What gives a person inner strength and self-confidence? Property, trust in people, and a set of everyday and professional skills that make his behavior meaningful and gives dignity and meaning to his actions. Does all this exist in people in present-day Russia? Read the book and decide. The book is written for those who are interested in a fresh socio-psychological view of Russian and Soviet history, culture and politics of the 20th century and how these events influenced the mentality of the Russian people. The book can also be of interest to scientists and students in Russia and abroad.
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