Business and the State in Contemporary Russia is the most recent volume in the John M. Olin Critical Issues series, published by Westview in conjunction with Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Research. In this latest installation, contributors discuss issues as far-ranging as the dynamics of rule in contemporary Russia, the banking elite, the politics of the Russian media business, the political economy of the Russian oil and coal industries, and the causes and consequences of the August 1998 crash.
"This book presents a study of the complex relationship between the Russian state and big business during Vladimir Putin's first two presidential terms (2000-2008). Based on extensive original research, it focuses on the interaction of Russia's political executive with the 'oligarchs'. It shows how Putin's crackdown on this elite group led big business to accept new 'rules of the game', and how this was accompanied by the involvement of big business in policy formulation, particularly through the organisational vehicle of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP). It goes on to discuss why Yukos and its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky were targeted by Russia's political authorities and the resultant consequences, namely the end of the relatively successful framework via which state-business relations had been managed, and its replacement by fear and mutual distrust, along with a vastly expanded role for the state, and state-related actors, in the Russian corporate sector. The book explores all these developments in detail and sets them against the context of continued trends towards greater authoritarianism in Russia"--
Moscow in Movement is the first exhaustive study of social movements, protest, and the state-society relationship in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Beginning in 2005 and running through the summer of 2013, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between citizens and their state through a series of in-depth case studies, explaining how Russians mobilized to defend human and civil rights, the environment, and individual and group interests: a process that culminated in the dramatic election protests of 2011–2012 and their aftermath. To understand where this surprising mobilization came from, and what it might mean for Russia's political future, the author looks beyond blanket arguments about the impact of low levels of trust, the weight of the Soviet legacy, or authoritarian repression, and finds an active and boisterous citizenry that nevertheless struggles to gain traction against a ruling elite that would prefer to ignore them. On a broader level, the core argument of this volume is that political elites, by structuring the political arena, exert a decisive influence on the patterns of collective behavior that make up civil society—and the author seeks to test this theory by applying it to observable facts in historical and comparative perspective. Moscow in Movement will be of interest to anyone looking for a bottom-up, citizens' eye view of recent Russian history, and especially to scholars and students of contemporary Russian politics and society, comparative politics, and sociology.
Russia is often portrayed as a regressive, even lawless country, and yet the Russian state has played a major role in shaping and experimenting with law as an instrument of power. In Law and the Russian State, William E. Pomeranz examines Russia's legal evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, addressing the continuities and disruptions of Russian law during the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet. The book covers key themes, including: * Law and empire * Law and modernization * The politicization of law * The role of intellectuals and dissidents in mobilizing the law * The evolution of Russian legal institutions * The struggle for human rights * The rule-of-law * The quest to establish the law-based state It also analyzes legal culture and how Russians understand and use the law. With a detailed bibliography, this is an important text for anyone seeking a sophisticated understanding of how Russian society and the Russian state have developed in the last 350 years.
In most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians from all ranks of society were bound together by a culture of honor. Here one of the foremost scholars of early modern Russia explores the intricate and highly stylized codes that made up this culture. Nancy Shields Kollmann describes how these codes were manipulated to construct identity and enforce social norms—and also to defend against insults, to pursue vendettas, and to unsettle communities. She offers evidence for a new view of the relationship of state and society in the Russian empire, and her richly comparative approach enhances knowledge of statebuilding in premodern Europe. By presenting Muscovite state and society in the context of medieval and early modern Europe, she exposes similarities that blur long-standing distinctions between Russian and European history.Through the prism of honor, Kollmann examines the interaction of the Russian state and its people in regulating social relations and defining an individual's rank. She finds vital information in a collection of transcripts of legal suits brought by elites and peasants alike to avenge insult to honor. The cases make clear the conservative role honor played in society as well as the ability of men and women to employ this body of ideas to address their relations with one another and with the state. Kollmann demonstrates that the grand princes—and later the tsars—tolerated a surprising degree of local autonomy throughout their rapidly expanding realm. Her work marks a stark contrast with traditional Russian historiography, which exaggerates the power of the state and downplays the volition of society.
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
This book presents a study of the complex relationship between the Russian state and big business during Vladimir Putin’s first two presidential terms (2000–2008). Based on extensive original research, it focuses on the interaction of Russia’s political executive with the ‘oligarchs’. It shows how Putin’s crackdown on this elite group led big business to accept new ‘rules of the game’ and how this was accompanied by the involvement of big business in policy formulation, particularly through the organisational vehicle of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP). It goes on to discuss why Yukos and its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky were targeted by Russia’s political authorities and the resultant consequences, namely the end of the relatively successful framework via which state-business relations had been managed, and its replacement by fear and mutual distrust, along with a vastly expanded role for the state, and state-related actors, in the Russian corporate sector. The book explores all these developments in detail and sets them against the context of continued trends towards greater authoritarianism in Russia.
During the Soviet era, blat—the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures—was necessary to compensate for the inefficiencies of socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union produced a new generation of informal practices. In How Russia Really Works, Alena V. Ledeneva explores practices in politics, business, media, and the legal sphere in Russia in the 1990s—from the hiring of firms to create negative publicity about one's competitors, to inventing novel schemes of tax evasion and engaging in "alternative" techniques of contract and law enforcement. Ledeneva discovers ingenuity, wit, and vigor in these activities and argues that they simultaneously support and subvert formal institutions. They enable corporations, the media, politicians, and businessmen to operate in the post-Soviet labyrinth of legal and practical constraints but consistently undermine the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. The "know-how" Ledeneva describes in this book continues to operate today and is crucial to understanding contemporary Russia.
