The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia

Notes

Preface and Acknowledgments

1. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 1.

2. See the two-volume book by Francis Fukuyama: Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011); and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2014). See also Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty (New York: Penguin, 2019).

3. See Worldwide Governance Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021); http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/, accessed May 31, 2021. See also Jan Teorell, Aksel Sundström, Sören Holmberg, Bo Rothstein, Natalia Alvarado Pachon, Cem Mert Dalli, The Quality of Government Standard Dataset, version January 2021 (Gothenburg: Quality of Government Institute, 2021), https://www.gu.se/en/quality-government/qog-data/data-downloads/standard-dataset, accessed May 31, 2021.

4. For an anthropological study of these issues, see Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5. See Albert O. Hirschman, A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971).

Chapter 1

1. For example, in 2019, Russia ranked 137th of 180 countries in the annual Corruption Perception Index. See Corruption Perception Index (Berlin: Transparency International, 2020), https://www.transparency.org/cpi2019, accessed September 7, 2021. In 2020, the composite evaluation of the Rule of Law Index by the World Justice Project ranked Russia 94th out of 128 countries. See World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020 (Washington, DC: World Justice Project, 2020), https://worldjusticeproject.org/sites/default/files/documents/WJP-ROLI-2020-Online_0.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021. The average indicator for corruption control in Russia in the 1996–2015 period, according to the World Bank, was –0.86 on a scale from –2.5 (lowest possible grade) tо +2.5 (highest possible grade). See Worldwide Governance Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021), http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/, accessed September 7, 2021.

2. Among numerous journalist investigations, one of the most impressive is the Panama Papers, a series of reports about global high-profile corruption and money laundering provided by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, https://www.occrp.org/en/, accessed September 7, 2021. For evidence on Russia, see: Roman Anin, Olesya Shmagun, Dmitry Velikovsky, “The Secret Caretaker,” https://www.occrp.org/en/panamapapers/the-secret-caretaker/, April 3, 2016, accessed September 7, 2021; Paul Radu, “Russia: The Cellist and the Lawyer,” https://www.occrp.org/en/panamapapers/russia-the-cellist-and-the-lawyer/, April 26, 2016, accessed September 7, 2021; Roman Anin, “Russia: Banking on Influence,” https://www.occrp.org/en/panamapapers/rossiya-putins-bank/, June 9, 2016, accessed September 7, 2021.

3. See Sergey Aleksashenko, Putin’s Counterrevolution: How Putin’s Autocracy Undercut Russia’s Economy and Chances for Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018); Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

4. The most visible examples were presented in a series of investigative reports produced by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, led by the key figure of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny. See “On vam ne Dimon,” https://dimon.navalny.com, accessed September 7, 2021—a 2017 documentary film about the corruption of then-prime minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, which reached more than seventeen million views in a month after release. See https://www.youtube.com/embed/qrwlk7_GF9g?hl=en&cc_lang_pref=en&cc_load_policy=1, accessed September 7, 2021. In 2021, the Russian courts jailed Navalny and labeled the Anti-Corruption Foundation an “extremist” organization.

5. See Andrey Zvyagintsev, Leviathan (2014), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2802154/, accessed September 7, 2021. The film won numerous major awards, including Best Screenplay at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Film of the 72th Golden Globe Awards.

6. See Andrey Zaostrovtsev, “Authoritarianism and Institutional Decay in Russia: Disruption of Property Rights and the Rule of Law,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 73–94.

7. See Brian Taylor, The Code of Putinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 159–160.

8. For a detailed account of Lorenzetti’s frescoes from the perspective of art history, see Patrick Boucheron, “‘Turn Your Eyes to Behold Her, You, Who Are Governing, Who Is Portrayed Here’: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Fresco of Good Government,” Annales. History, Sciences Sociales 60 (2005/06): 1137–1199. I am indebted to Gilles Favarel-Garrigues for this reference.

9. For an account from the perspective of political theory, see Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 1–56.

10. See The Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg, https://qog.pol.gu.se/, accessed September 7, 2021.

11. For detailed consideration of the meaning of these frescoes, see Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo Frescoes: Two Old Questions, Two New Answers,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 1–28.

12. Among numerous accounts of Russia’s post-Communist transformations, see Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999); Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reforms Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007); Vladimir Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), especially chapter 3.

13. For analyses of the problems with the rule of law in post-Communist Russia, see, in particular, Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Role of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Jordan Gans-Morse, Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and the Demand for Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Kathryn Hendley, Everyday Law in Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Maria Popova, “Putin-Style ‘Rule of Law’ and the Prospects for Change,” Daedalus 146, no. 2 (2017): 64–75; Taylor, The Code of Putinism, especially chapter 5.

14. Among the voluminous literature on the subject, see, in particular, Bo Rothstein, Jan Teorell, “What Is Quality of Government? A Theory of Impartial Government Institutions,” Governance 21, no. 2 (2008): 165–190; Bert A. Rockman, Sung Deuk Hamn, “The Notion of Good and Bad Governance in Comparative Perspective,” Korean Journal of Policy Studies 26, no. 2 (2011): 1–16; Good Government: The Relevance of Political Science, eds. Sören Holmberg, Bo Rothstein (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012).

15. See David Buchan, “Soviet Export of Technologies,” Financial Times, September 14, 1984.

16. For an important and insightful analysis, see Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance, eds. Alexander Cooley, Jack Snyder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), especially chapters 1 and 7.

17. For the classical notion of the use of “deviant case analyses” for theory-building in comparative politics, see Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review 65, no. 3 (1971): 682–693.

18. Francis Fukuyama, “What Is Governance?” Governance 26, no. 3 (2013): 350.

19. See Mark Bevir, Democratic Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Good Government: The Relevance of Political Science.

20. For a comprehensive overview, see The Oxford Handbook of Governance, ed. David Levi-Faur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

21. See Worldwide Governance Indicators; Jan Teorell, Aksel Sundström, Sören Holmberg, Bo Rothstein, Natalia Alvarado Pachon, Cem Mert Dalli, The Quality of Government Standard Dataset, version January 2021 (Gothenburg: The Quality of Government Institute, 2021), https://www.gu.se/en/quality-government/qog-data/data-downloads/standard-dataset, accessed September 7, 2021.

22. See Bo Rothstein, “Good Governance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Governance, ed. David Levi-Faur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 143–154.

23. For definitions and criteria of measurement, see Worldwide Governance Indicators.

24. See Elites, Institutions, and the Quality of Government, eds. Carl Dahlström, Lena Wängnerud (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Carl Dahlström, Victor Lapuente, Organizing Leviathan: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Making of Good Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

25. According to Guillermo O’Donnell, these principles are: “1. All laws should be prospective, open and clear; 2. Laws should be relatively stable; 3. The making of particular laws . . . must be guided by open, stable, clear, and general rules; 4. The independence of the judiciary must be guaranteed; 5. The principles of natural justice must be observed (i.e., open and fair hearing and absence of bias); 6. The courts should have review powers . . . to ensure conformity to the rule of law; 7. The courts should be easily accessible; 8. The discretion of crime preventing agencies should not be allowed to pervert the law.” See Guillermo A. O’Donnell, “Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America: A Partial Conclusion,” in The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America, eds. Juan E. Mendez, Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 317.

26. See Russian Modernization: A New Paradigm, eds. Markku Kivinen, Brendan Humphreys (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), especially chapters 1 and 7.

27. See Ella Paneyakh, “Zarergulirovannoe gosudarstvo,” Pro et Contra 13, nos.1–2 (2013): 58–92: Ella Paneyakh, “The Overregulated State,” Social Sciences 45, no. 1 (2014): 20–33.

28. See Nicholas Sharron, Victor Lapuente, “Does Democracy Produce Quality of Government?,” European Journal of Political Research 49, no. 4 (2010): 443–470; Andrey Melville, Mikhail Mironyuk, “‘Bad Enough’ Governance: State Capacity and Quality of Institutions in Post-Soviet Autocracies,” Post-Soviet Affairs 32, no. 2 (2016): 132–151.

29. See, for example, Corruption and Governance (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, n.d.), http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TlSOP14Xq18J:lnweb18.worldbank.org/eca/eca.nsf/Sectors/ECSPE/E9AC26BAE82D37D685256A940073F4E9%3FOpenDocument+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fi, accessed April 14, 2020.

30. On “conceptual stretching,” see Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (1970): 1033–1053; David Collier, James P. Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 4 (1993): 845–855.

31. See Alina Mingiu-Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Richard Rose, Caryn Peiffer, Bad Governance and Corruption (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

32. See Douglass C. North, John J. Wallis, Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

33. See Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012).

34. On informal institutions, see International Handbook of Informal Governance, eds. Thomas Christensen, Christine Neuhold (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012); The Global Encyclopedia of Informality, 2 vols., ed. Alena V. Ledeneva (London: UCL Press, 2018).

35. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 53.

36. On “power pyramids,” see Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 6.

37. On types and causes of corruption, see Andrei Shleifer, Robert W. Vishny, “Corruption,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3 (1993): 599–617; Daniel Treisman, “The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Public Economics 76, no. 3 (2000): 399–457.

38. See O’Donnell, “Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America: A Partial Conclusion,” 303.

39. See Margit Cohn, “Fuzzy Legality in Regulation: The Legislative Mandate Revisited,” Law and Policy 23, no. 4 (2001): 469–497.

40. See Ronald Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

41. See Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia, chapter 2; The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia, ed. Daniel Treisman (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018); Timothy Frye, The Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).

42. “Institutions . . . are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to devise new rules,” Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Changes, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 16.

43. See Acemoglu, Robinson, Why Nations Fail, especially chapter 3.

44. See North, Wallis, Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, especially chapter 1.

45. See Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1993)

46. See Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Trust and Governance, eds. Valerie Braithwaite, Margaret Levi (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998).

47. See Bo Rothstein, The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

48. See Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958); Allen Hicken, “Clientelism,” Annual Review of Political Science 14 (2011): 289–310; Hale, Patronal Politics, especially chapter 3.

49. See Putnam, Making Democracy Work; Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rothstein, The Quality of Government.

50. Among the voluminous literature on Russia and post-Soviet countries, see, in particular, Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution; Gerald Easter, Coercion, Capital, and Postcommunist States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks, and Informal Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Hale, Patronal Politics; Brian D. Taylor, “The Transformation of the Russian State,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State, eds. Stephan Leibfried, Evelyne Huber, Matthew Lange, Johan D. Levy, John D. Stephens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 637–653.

51. See Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, especially chapter 8.

52. See Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy; Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism.

53. See Balint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016).

54. See Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise?, especially chapter 1.

55. See Hale, Patronal Politics, chapter 3.

56. See Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence: A People with a Troubled History (London: Routledge, 2005).

57. For a classical account from this perspective, see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974).

58. For comparative historical analyses, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); North, Wallis, Weingast, Violence and Social Orders; Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011); Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).

59. See Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 567–576.

60. The list of heavily corrupt and completely inefficient leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo (Zaire) (1965–1997) or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe (1980–2017), is quite extensive. Among leaders in post-Soviet Eurasia, Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan (1985–2006), as well as his successor, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedow, who rules the country until 2022, may belong to this category.

61. For a critical account, see William R. Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

62. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128.

63. See Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–187; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States.

64. See Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.

65. See Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeen-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): 803–832; for a theoretical and comparative analysis, see North, Wallis, Weingast, Violence and Social Orders.

66. See Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

67. Among the voluminous literature on the subject, see in particular: Democracy in Decline?, eds. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Broadway Books, 2018); Yascha Mounk, “The Undemocratic Dilemma,” Journal of Democracy 29, no. 2 (2018): 98–112.

68. For a detailed account of varieties of authoritarian regimes, see Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For a comparison of quality of governance in various types of authoritarian regimes, see Nicolas Charron and Victor Lapuente, “Which Dictators Produce Quality of Government?,” Studies in Comparative International Development 46, no. 4 (2011): 397–423.

69. For analysis of these issues in a comparative perspective, see Alexander Libman, Michael Rochlitz, Federalism in China and Russia: Story of Success and Story of Failure? (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019).

70. Dani Rodrik, “The Myth of Authoritarian Growth,” Project Syndicate, August 9, 2010, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-myth-of-authoritarian-growth, accessed September 7, 2021.

71. For this argument, see Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook, especially chapter 3.

72. See William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). The real story that inspired Golding’s novel was just the opposite: teenagers, who serve as the main characters of the book, demonstrated a high capacity and willingness to cooperate for the common good. See Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), chapter 2.

73. For the first such interpretation of the novel among political scientists, see Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 416.

74. See Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook.

75. See Taylor, “The Transformation of the Russian State.”

76. See Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–234.

77. See Hale, Patronal Politics, especially chapter 11; Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia, chapter 2; Lucan A. Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), especially chapter 6.

78. See North, Institutions, 16.

79. On “performance legitimacy” under authoritarianism, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 55.

80. For a comparative analysis, see Jason Brownlee, “Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies,” World Politics, 59, no. 4 (2007): 595–628.

81. See Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development.”

82. See Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy.

83. On protests in Russia in the 1990s and in the 2000s, see Graeme B. Robertson, The Politics of Protests in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Samuel A. Greene, Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

84. On the impact of international actors on economic policies and regulatory frameworks in Eastern Europe, see, in particular, Hilary Appel, Mitchell Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

85. On the impact of Western linkages and leverages on regime-building in various regions of the world, see Levitsky, Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, chapter 2.

86. See Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook, chapter 1.

87. See Melville, Mironyuk, “‘Bad Enough’ Governance.”

88. See Fabian Burkhardt, “Foolproofing Putinism,” Ridl.io, 2021, March 29, https://www.ridl.io/en/foolproofing-putinism/, accessed September 7, 2021.

89. For a detailed account, see Andrei Yakovlev, “Composition of Ruling Elite, Incentives for Productive Usage of Rents, and the Prospects of Russia’s Limited Access Order,” Post-Soviet Affairs 37, no. 5 (2021): 417–434.

90. For these parallels, see Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia, 25–26.

91. For some accounts of governance during the last decades of the Soviet Union, see, in particular, Jerry F. Hough, Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council of Foreign Relations, 1986); Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007).

92. For a detailed account, see William A. Clark, Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom: Combatting Corruption in the Soviet Elite, 1965–1990 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).

93. For different assessments of Soviet economic policies during perestroika, see Anders Åslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Vladimir Mau, “Perestroika: Theoretical and Political Problems of Economic Reforms in the USSR,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 3 (1995): 387–411; Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

94. Among different accounts of the Soviet collapse, see, in particular, David Kotz, Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (London: Routledge, 1997); Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire; Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Serhiy Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

95. See Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurship, chapter 5.

96. For detailed descriptions, see Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000); David Hoffman, Oligarchs: The Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2002).

97. See Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

98. See Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurship, chapters 5 and 6.

99. On the “triple transition,” see Claus Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe,” Social Research 58, no. 4 (1991): 865–892.

100. See Yakov Pappe and Yana Galukhina, Rossiiskii krupnyi biznes: pervye 15 let, Ekonomicheskie khroniki 1993–2008 (Moscow: State University—Higher School of Economics, 2009); Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).

101. See Vladimir Gel’man, “Leviathan’s Return? The Policy of Recentralization in Contemporary Russia,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, eds. Cameron Ross, Adrian Campbell (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–24; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia: How Putin Changed the Contract with His Agents and the Problems It Created for Medvedev,” Publius 40, no. 4 (2010): 672–696.

102. See Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurship, chapter 6.

103. See Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3–37.

104. On post-revolutionary stabilization, see Arthur Stinchcombe, “Ending Revolutions and Building New Governments,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 49–73.

105. For a detailed account of economic changes in Russia, see The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy, eds. Michael Alexeev, Shlomo Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

106. See Aleksashenko, Putin’s Counterrevolution, chapter 1.

107. See also Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

108. For some descriptions, see Aleksashenko, Putin’s Counterrevolution, especially chapter 6; Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism, chapter 2.

109. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 86.

110. For comparative analyses of Russia’s subnational politics, see Ora John Reuter, Graeme B. Robertson, “Subnational Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Russian Gubernatorial Appointments,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 4 (2012): 1023–1037; Noah Buckley, Ora John Reuter, “Performance Incentives under Autocracy: Evidence from Russia’s Regions,” Comparative Politics 51, no. 2 (2019): 239–266.

111. For a comprehensive account, see Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki, ed. Kirill Rogov (Moscow: Liberal’naya missiya, 2021).

112. See Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia, chapter 5.

Chapter 2

1. See Alexei Navalny, “Khroniki genotsida russkikh,” navalny.com, December 24, 2014, https://navalny.com/p/4036/, accessed September 7, 2021.

2. For various accounts of reforms in the railway sector in Russia since the 2000s, see Russell Pittman, “Blame the Switchman? Russian Railways Restructuring after Ten Years,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy, eds. Michael Alexeev, Shlomo Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 490–513; Konstantin Gaaze, “Reformy po krugu: president vernul elektrichki, kotorye sam otmenil,” Forbes.ru, February 5, 2015, http://www.forbes.ru/mneniya-column/vertikal/279533-reformy-po-krugu-prezident-vernul-elektrichki-kotorye-sam-otmenil, accessed April, 18, 2020; Farid Khusainov, Zheleznye dorogi i rynok (Moscow, Nauka, 2015), 64–117. For a critical assessment, see Alexei Navalny, “Problema elektrichek, likbez ot FBK,” navalny.com, February 5, 2015, https://navalny.com/p/4107/, accessed September 7, 2021.

3. The regional budgets bear responsibility for implementing Vladimir Putin’s May 2012 decrees that called on regional authorities to achieve a major rise in public sector employees’ salaries without an increase in budgetary revenues, so many other expenditures (including subsidizing commuter trains) were inevitably cut.

4. See Navalny, “Problema elektrichek.”

5. I am indebted to Farid Khusainov for clarifications of these issues.

6. See Pittman, “Blame the Switchman?”

7. See Nikolay Petrov, “Nomenklatura and the Elite,” Russia in 2020: Scenarios for the Future, eds. Maria Lipman, Nikolay Petrov (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), 499–530.

8. See Yakunin’s personal web page on the official site of the Faculty of Political Science at the Moscow State University, http://polit.msu.ru/teachers/yakunin/, accessed September 7, 2021. Yakunin’s major 470-page coauthored monograph, which portrayed vicious attacks by the West on the Russian statehood and called for Russian counterattacks, may be regarded as a prime example of a conspiracy theory. See Vladimir Yakunin, Vardan Bagdasaryan, Stepan Sulakshin, Novye tekhnologii bor’by s rossiiskoi gosudarsnennost’yu, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Nauchnyi ekspert, 2013).

9. See 22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World’s Foremost Thinkers, eds. Piotr Dutkiewicz, Richard Sakwa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), chapter 9.

10. See Navalny, “Problema elektrichek.”

11. See Brian Taylor, The Code of Putinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 5. For a general account of state-business relations in Russia, see Andrei Yakovlev, “The Evolution of Business-State Interaction in Russia: From State Capture to Business Capture?” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 7 (2006): 1033–1056; Andrei Yakovlev, “State-Business Relations in Russia after 2011: ‘New Deal’ or Imitation of Changes?” in The Challenge for Russia’s Politicized Economic System, ed. Susanne Oxenstierna (Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2015), 59–76.

12. See Mikhail Bushuev, “Zachem byvshii glava RZhD Yakunin poluchil nemetskuyu rabochuyu vizu,” dw.com, August 21, 2018, https://www.dw.com/ru/зачем-бывший-глава-ржд-якунин-получил-немецкую-рабочую-визу/a-45157830, accessed September 7, 2021.

13. See Farid Khusainov, “Negromkii yubilei. Programme strukturnoi reformy na zheleznodorozhnom transporte—20 let,” vgudok.com, May 20, 2021, https://vgudok.com/lenta/negromkiy-yubiley-programme-strukturnoy-reformy-na-zheleznodorozhnom-transporte-20-let, accessed September 7, 2021.

14. For a detailed historical account, see The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945, eds. R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, S. G. Wheatcroft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 8.

15. See Pittman, “Blame the Switchman?”; Khusainov, Zheleznye dorogi i rynok, 71–92.

16. In particular, the leader of the Russian opposition Alexei Navalny achieved his nationwide name recognition because of numerous disclosures of high-profile corruption among top officials and state managers, presented in much detail on his website, www.navalny.com, accessed September 7, 2021. See “On vam ne Dimon,” https://dimon.navalny.com/, accessed September 7, 2021.

17. For a detailed overview, see The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy, eds. Michael Alexeev, Shlomo Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also chapter 4 of this book.

18. See Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Changes, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 16.

19. See Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially chapters 3 and 4; Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially chapters 4 and 5.

20. See Andreas Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

21. See Marc Morje Howard, Philip G. Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 2 (2006): 365–381.

22. For overviews, see Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 908–926; Jody La Porte, Danielle Lussier, “What Was the Leninist Legacy? Assessing Twenty Years of Scholarship,” Slavic Review 70, no. 3 (2011): 637–654.

23. See Michael Bratton, Nicolas van de Walle, “Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa,” World Politics 46, no. 4 (1994): 453–489; Gero Erdmann, Ulf Engel, Neopatrimonialism Revisited: Beyond a Catch-all Concept (Hamburg: German Institute for Global and Area Studies, 2006), GIGA Working Paper no. 16, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/71729549.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

24. See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974).

25. See Kenneth Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies 35 no. 3 (1983): 275–297.

26. See Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21–24.

27. See Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 3.

28. See Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks, and Informal Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially chapter 1.

29. See Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence (London: Routledge, 2005).

30. On the “track” as a Russian understanding of path dependency, see Aleksandr Auzan, “Lovushka ‘kolei,’” Colta.ru, September 4, 2015, http://www.colta.ru/articles/society/8428, accessed September 7, 2021.

31. For a detailed account of the “Cotton Affair,” the most notorious case of high-level corruption in Soviet Uzbekistan, see Riccardo Mario Cucciolla, The Crisis of Soviet Power in Central Asia: The ‘Uzbek Cotton Affair, 1975–1991 (PhD dissertation, Lucca: IMT School of Advanced Studies, 2017), http://e-theses.imtlucca.it/213/1/Cucciolla_phdthesis.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

32. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), especially chapter 3.

33. See Konstantin Sonin, “Why the Rich May Favor Poor Protection of Property Rights,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31, no. 4 (2003): 715–731; Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reforms Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007); Oleksandr Fisun, “Rethinking Post-Soviet Politics from a Neopatrimonial Perspective,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 20, no. 2 (2012): 87–96; Hale, Patronal Politics, especially chapter 6.

34. See North, Institutions, 3.

35. Stephen Kotkin, Mark R. Beissinger, “The Historical Legacies of Communism: An Empirical Agenda,” in Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds. Mark R. Beissinger, Stephen Kotkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7.

36. Ibid., 16.

37. See Clifford G. Gaddy, “Room for Error: The Economic Legacy of Soviet Spatial Misallocation,” in Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds. Mark R. Beissinger, Stephen Kotkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 52–67.

38. See Vladimir Gel’man, Otar Marganiya, Dmitry Travin, Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, 1985–2000: Generations, Ideas, and Changes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), especially chapter 6.

39. See Arthur Denzau, Douglass C. North, “Sharing Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions,” Kyklos 47, no. 1 (1994): 3–31.

40. See Eugene Huskey, “Legacies and Departures in the Russian State Executive,” in Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds. Mark R. Beissinger, Stephen Kotkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 111–127.

41. See Brian Taylor, “From Police State to Police State? Legacies and Law Enforcement in Russia,” in Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds. Mark R. Beissinger, Stephen Kotkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 128–151.

42. See Vadim Volkov, Ivan Griroriev, Arina Dmitrieva, Ekaterina Moiseeva, Ella Paneyakh, Mikhail Pozdnyakov, Kirill Titaev, Irina Chetverikova, Maria Shklyaruk, Kontseptsiya kompleksnoi organizatsionno-upravlencheskoi reformy pravookhranitel’nykh organov RF (Saint Petersburg, European University at Saint Petersburg, Institute for the Rule of Law, 2013), http://www.enforce.spb.ru/images/Issledovanya/IRL_KGI_Reform_final_11.13.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021; Ella Paneyakh, “Faking Performances Together: Systems of Performance Evaluation in Russian Enforcement Agencies and Production of Bias and Privilege,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 115–136; Brian D. Taylor, “The Transformation of the Russian State,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State, eds. Stephan Leibfried, Evelyne Huber, Matthew Lange, Johan D. Levy, John D. Stephens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 637–653.

43. On the “power vertical,” see Vladimir Gel’man, Sergei Ryzhenkov, “Local Regimes, Sub-National Governance, and the Power Vertical” in Contemporary Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 3 (2011): 449–465.

44. For example, workplace mobilization during the 2011–2012 national elections in Russia was less typical for private enterprises in comparison with state-owned companies and the public sector. See Timothy Frye, Ora John Reuter, David Szakonyi, “Political Machines at Work: Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace,” World Politics 66, no. 2 (2014): 195–228.

45. See Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Role of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), chapters 5 and 6.

46. See Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia: How Putin Changed the Contract with His Agents and the Problems It Created for Medvedev,” Publius 40, no. 4 (2010): 672–696; Gel’man, Ryzhenkov, “Local Regimes.”

47. For comparisons of subnational governance in China and Russia, see Michael Rochlitz, Vera Kulpina, Thomas Remington, Andrei Yakovlev, “Performance Incentives and Economic Growth: Regional Officials in Russia and China,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 56, no. 4 (2015): 421–445; Alexander Libman, Michael Rochlitz, Federalism in China and Russia: Story of Success and Story of Failure? (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019).

48. See Eugene Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).

49. For an in-depth analysis of the complex web of relationships between Russia’s law enforcement agencies and its effects on their performance, see Ella Paneyakh, Kirill Titaev, Maria Shklyaruk, Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela: institutsional’nyi analiz (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2018).

50. For example, more than 10 percent of Russian city mayors faced with criminal charges during the period between 2002 and 2018. See Noah Buckley, Ora John Reuter, Michael Rochlitz, Anton Aisin, “Staying Out of Trouble: Criminal Cases Against Russian Mayors,” Comparative Political Studies, online first, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00104140211047399, accessed February 18, 2022.

51. See Kirill Rogov, “The Art of Coercion: Repressions and Repressiveness in Putin’s Russia,” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (2018): 151–174.

52. For empirical evidence and analyses, see Keith Darden, “The Integrity of Corrupt State: Graft as an Informal Political Institution,” Politics and Society 36, no. 1 (2008): 35–59; Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise?

53. On the role of schools in vote delivery during elections in Russia, see Natalia Forrat, “Shock-Resistant Authoritarianism: Schoolteachers and Infrastructural State Capacity in Putin’s Russia,” Comparative Politics 50, no. 3 (2018): 417–449.

54. See Ivan Petrov, Viktor Yadukha, “Molodezh’ mechtaet o trube,” rbc.ru, May 27, 2009, https://www.udbiz.ru/novosti/38/5792/, accessed September 7, 2021.

55. See Kontseptsiya kompleksnoi organizatsionno-upravlencheskoi reformy; Paneyakh, Titaev, Shklayruk, Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela, chapter 2.

56. For a detailed account, see Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).

57. For various interpretations of intraelite relationships in Russia, see Petrov, “Nomenklatura and the Elite”; Evgeny Minchenko, Kirill Petrov, Politburo 2.0: Renovation Instead of Dismantling, October 12, 2017, https://minchenko.ru/netcat_files/userfiles/2/Dokumenty/Politburo_2.0_October_2017_ENG.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021. See also “The Foreign Policy Attitudes of Russian Elites, 1993–2016,” Post-Soviet Affairs 35, no. 5–6 (2019), special issue.

58. See Erdmann, Engel, Neopatrimonialism Revisited.

59. See Bratton, van de Walle, “Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions.”

60. For a detailed overview, see Russia after the Global Economic Crisis, eds. Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010).

61. See Michael Bratton, Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Erdmann, Engel, Neopatrimonialism Revisited.

62. See Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki, ed. Kirill Rogov (Moscow: Liberal’naya missiya, 2021).

63. For this argument, see Kirill Rogov, “Forty Years in the Desert: The Political Cycles of Post-Soviet Transition,” in Russia 2025: Scenarios for the Russian Future, eds. Maria Lipman, Nikolay Petrov (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 18–45.

64. For an in-depth analysis, see Brian Taylor, “The Police Reform in Russia: Policy Process in a Hybrid Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 226–255.

65. See William R. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), part II.

66. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma.

67. See Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).

68. For the essence of these risk perceptions among Russia’s liberal reformers, see “Zhestkim kursom . . . Analiticheskaya zapiska Leningradskoi assotsiatsii sotsial’no-ekonomicheskikh nauk,” Vek ХХ i mir, no. 6 (1990): 15–19.

69. For an account of the effects of distributional coalitions in Russia’s regions, see Anton Shirikov, Anatomiya bezdeistviya: politicheskie instituty i byudzhetnye konflikty v regionakh Rossii (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2010).

70. For a classic account, see Jeffrey L. Pressman, Aaron B. Wildavsky, Implementation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

71. For a critique of “high modernism,” see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

72. See Paneyakh, “Faking Performances Together”; Paneyakh, Titaev, Shklyaruk, Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela, chapter 3.

73. For an analysis of the “loyalty versus efficiency” dilemma among Russia’s regional chief executives, see Ora John Reuter, Graeme B. Robertson, “Subnational Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Russian Gubernatorial Appointments,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 4 (2012): 1023–1037.

74. See Lev Lyubimov, “Ne nuzhno vsem vydavat’ attestaty. Pochemu v Rossii pora menyat’ podkhod k obucheniyu v shkolakh,” Lenta.ru, February 19, 2015, http://lenta.ru/articles/2015/02/19/school/, accessed September 7, 2021.

75. On these changes, see Doing Business 2015: Going beyond Efficiency (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015), http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2015, accessed September 7, 2021. For a critical overview of the use of global rankings in various countries, see Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance, ed. Alexander Cooley, Jack Snyder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

76. For a detailed yet controversial account, see Grigory Rodchenkov, The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Russia’s Secret Doping Empire (London: Penguin Random House, 2020).

77. See “Doing Business—Data Irregularities Statement,” The World Bank, August 27, 2020, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2020/08/27/doing-business-data-irregularities-statement, accessed September 7, 2021.

78. For a critical account, see Andrei Yakovlev, Denis Ivanov, “Tekhnicheskii uspekh: pochemu vzlet Rossii v Doing Business ne pomog biznesu,” Rbc.ru, November 14, 2018, https://www.rbc.ru/opinions/economics/14/11/2018/5bebd6db9a7947c705e43594, accessed September 7, 2021.

79. For a detailed overview, see The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy.

80. See Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, part I.

81. See Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012), especially chapter 3.

82. On these strategies, see Yaroslav Kuzminov, Vadim Radaev, Andrei Yakovlev, Yevgeny Yasin, “Instituty: ot zaimstvovaniya k vyrashchivaniyu (opyt rossiiskikh reform i vozmozhnosti kul’tivirovaniya institutsional’nykh izmenenii),” Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 5 (2005): 5–27.

83. On the role of experts in policy-making under authoritarianism, see, in particular, William R. Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014), especially chapter 13; Calvert W. Jones, “Adviser to the King: Experts, Rationality, and Legitimacy,” World Politics 71, no. 1 (2019): 1–43.

84. See Andrey Zaostrovtsev, “Zakon vseobshchei shitizatsii,” fontanka.ru, August 11, 2009, http://www.fontanka.ru/2009/08/11/116/, accessed September 7, 2021.

85. For a detailed account of implementation of the EGE in the 2000s, see Andrey Starodubtsev, “How Does the Government Implement Unpopular Reforms? Evidence from Education Policy in Russia,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 148–165.

86. North, Institutions, 16.

87. See Vladimir Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), chapter 5.

88. The minister, Mikhail Abyzov, a close ally of Dmitry Medvedev, left this post in 2018 because the ministerial office as such was abolished. In 2019, he was jailed due to accusations of embezzling state funds.

89. See Nikolay Petrov, Maria Lipman, Henry E. Hale, “Three Dilemmas of Hybrid Regime Governance: Russia from Putin to Putin,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 1 (2014): 1–26.

90. See chapter 4 of this book.

91. For a vivid account, see Alexei Navalny. “Dlya bor’by s korruptsiei v pravitel’stve net kvoruma,” navalny.com, February 9, 2015, https://navalny.com/p/4117/, accessed September 7, 2021.

92. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma, 63–69; The Politics of Public Sector Performance: Pockets of Effectiveness in Developing Countries, ed. Michael Roll (London: Routledge, 2014).

93. See Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts, especially part II.

94. For polemics, see Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Valerie J. Bunce, Sharon Wolchik, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lucan A. Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

95. See Levitsky, Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, especially chapter 2.

96. For a critical insider’s account of Russia’s relations with the IMF in the 1990s, see Martin Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan: Inside Russia’s 1998 Default (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

97. See Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, part III.

98. For a critique about Eastern Europe see Neil Abrams, M. Steven Fish, “Policies First, Institutions Second: Lessons from Estonia’s Economic Reforms,” Post-Soviet Affairs 31, no. 6 (2015): 491–513.

99. For a perceptive account of the behavior of Central Asian leaders and elites, see Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw, Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). For analysis of the legalization of status and wealth of Russian elites in the West, see Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Karen Dawisha, “The Escape from Institution-Building in a Globalized World: Lessons from Russia,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 2 (2017): 361–378.

100. For an in-depth analysis, see Juliet Johnson, Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

101. See Yoshiko M. Herrera, Mirrors of the Economy: National Accounts and International Norms in Russia and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

102. See Hilary Appel, Tax Politics in Eastern Europe: Globalization, Regional Integration, and the Democratic Compromise (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

103. For a similar argument, see Hale, Patronal Politics, 458–466.

104. See Balint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016); see also chapter 7 of this book.

Chapter 3

1. For the most vigorous arguments in favor of authoritarian modernization during the Cold War, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). For a detailed critical account of practical uses of this approach in developing countries, see William R. Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

2. For twenty-first-century discussions, see, for example, Parag Hanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (New York: Random House, 2008); Roberto Stefan Foa, “Modernization and Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 29, no. 3 (2018): 129–140. Scholars of the political economy of populism concentrate on the controversial impact of populist politicians on government performance. See Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou, “The Political Economy of Populism,” Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20201595&from=f, accessed February 15, 2022.

3. For a comprehensive account of various aspects of Russia’s modernization, see Russian Modernization: A New Paradigm, eds. Markku Kivinen, Brendan Humphreys (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).

4. On the concept of “triple transition,” see Claus Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe,” Social Research 58, no. 4 (1991): 865–892.

5. See Vladimir Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), especially chapter 3.

6. For various accounts, see Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reforms Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007); Clifford G. Gaddy, Barry W. Ickes, Bear Traps on Russia’s Road to Modernization (London: Routledge, 2013); Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks, and Informal Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

7. See Brian Taylor, The Code of Putinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia, ed. Daniel Treisman (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018); Timothy Frye, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).

8. See Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution; Gaddy, Ickes, Bear Traps; The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy, eds. Michael Alexeev, Shlomo Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

9. See Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Role of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Brian Taylor, State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Gerald Easter, Coercion, Capital, and Postcommunist States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

10. See Marie Mendras, Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise?; Taylor, The Code of Putinism, especially chapter 5.

11. See Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds. Mark R. Beissinger, Stephen Kotkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

12. See Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially chapter 2.

13. See Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 12; Daniel Treisman, “Income, Democracy, and Leader Turnover,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 4 (2007): 927–942.

14. For various accounts, see Sergey Aleksashenko, Putin’s Counterrevolution: How Putin’s Autocracy Undercut Russia’s Economy and Chances for Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018); Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

15. For classical accounts of the 1960s, see Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Cyril Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.

16. See Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Changes, and Democracy: A Human Development Sequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

17. “Neoliberalism” is widely used in present-day social science as a pejorative term. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a more balanced perspective in analysis of post-Communist neoliberal policies, see Hilary Appel, Mitchell Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

18. See Douglass C. North, John J. Wallis, Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

19. See Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012).

20. See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011); Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).

21. For a critical account, see Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts.

22. For an overview, see The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, eds. Rudiger Dornbusch, Sebastian Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

23. See Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies; Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).

24. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

25. See Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design?”

26. For the essence of these arguments, see Victor Polterovich, Vladimir Popov, “Democratization, Quality of Institutions and Economic Growth,” TIGER Working Papers, no. 102, 2007, http://www.tiger.edu.pl/publikacje/TWP102.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021; Vladimir Popov, Mixed Fortunes: An Economic History of China, Russia, and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

27. See “Zhestkim kursom . . . Analiticheskaya zapiska Leningradskoi assotsiatsii sotsial’no-ekonomicheskikh nauk”; Vek ХХ i mir no. 6 (1990): 15–19.

28. For the full text of this manifesto, see Dmitry Medvedev, “Rossiya, Vpered!,” Gazeta.ru, September 25, 2009, http://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2009/09/10_a_3258568.shtml, accessed September 7, 2021.

29. See Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 32–58.

30. See William Nordhaus, “The Political Business Cycle,” Review of Economic Studies 42, no. 2 (1975): 169–190. On political business cycles in Russia in the 1990s, see Daniel Treisman, Vladimir Gimpelson, “Political Business Cycles and Russian Elections, or The Manipulations of ‘Chudar,’” British Journal of Political Science 31, no. 2 (2001): 225–246.

31. See George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

32. See Fritz W. Sharpf, “The Joint-Decision Trap: Lessons from German Federalism and European Integration,” Public Administration 66, no. 3 (1988): 239–278.

33. See Hanna Bäck, Wolfgang C. Muller, Benjamin Nyblade, “Multiparty Government and Economic Policy-Making,” Public Choice 170 (2017): 33–62.

34. See Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, especially chapter 3.

35. See Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Stephan Haggard, Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

36. See Venelin I. Ganev, “The Dorian Gray Effect: Winners as State Breakers in Postcommunism,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 34, no. 1 (2001): 1–25; Anna Grzymala-Busse, “Political Competition and the Politicization of the State in East Central Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 36, no. 10 (2003): 1123–1147.

37. See Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design?”

38. See Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi, Democracy and Development, especially chapter 3.

39. See Popov, Mixed Fortunes, especially chapters 4 and 5.

40. For critical accounts, see Thomas Carothers, “The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 1 (2007): 12–27; Dani Rodrik, “The Myth of Authoritarian Growth,” Project Syndicate, August 9, 2010, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-myth-of-authoritarian-growth, accessed September 7, 2021.

41. See Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Black, The Dynamics of Modernization.

42. See Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

43. See Peter Evans, James E. Rauch, “Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross-National Analysis of Effects of the ‘Weberian’ State Structures on Economic Growth,” American Sociological Review 64, no. 5 (1999): 748–765.

44. See Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially chapters 8 and 9. See also Nicolas Charron, Victor Lapuente, “Which Dictators Produce Quality of Government?,” Studies in Comparative International Development 46, no. 4 (2011): 397–423.

45. See Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kenneth Greene, “The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single-Party Dominance,” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 7 (2010): 803–834.

46. See Hale, Patronal Politics, especially chapter 4.

47. See also chapter 4 of this book.

48. See Geddes, Wright, Frantz, How Dictatorships Work.

49. See Evans, Embedded Autonomy.

50. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011); Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

51. See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974).

52. For a comprehensive account by a Russian historian, see Boris Mironov, Rossiiskaya imperiya: ot traditisii k modernu, 3 vols. (Saint Petersburg: Dmitry Bulanin, 2018).

53. See Beissinger, Kotkin, eds., Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe.

54. See Gaddy, Ickes, Bear Traps, especially chapters 2 and 3.

55. See Levitsky, Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, chapter 2.

56. See, in particular, Paul R. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, Aleh Tsyvinski, “Was Stalin Necessary for Russia’s Economic Development?,” NBER Working Papers, no. 19425 (2013), https://www.nber.org/papers/w19425.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

57. See Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), chapter 4; Popov, Mixed Fortunes, chapter 3.

58. See Vladimir Gel’man, Otar Marganiya, Dmitry Travin, Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, 1985–2000: Generations, Ideas, and Changes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), especially chapter 3.

59. See Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000); Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution.

60. See Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurship, chapter 6; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

61. See Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reforms in Post-Communist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–234; Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map.

62. See Vadim Volkov, “Standard Oil and Yukos in the Context of Early Capitalism in the United States and Russia,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 16, no. 3 (2008): 240–264; Vladimir Gel’man, “Leviathan’s Return? The Policy of Recentralization in Contemporary Russia,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, eds. Cameron Ross, Adrian Campbell (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–24.

63. See Robert J. Brym, Vladimir Gimpelson, “The Size, Composition, and Dynamics of the Russian State Bureaucracy in the 1990s,” Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (2004): 90–112; The State after Communism: Governance in the New Russia, eds. Timothy J. Colton, Stephen Holmes (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Taylor, State Building in Putin’s Russia.

64. For an empirical analysis, see Ora John Reuter, Graeme B. Robertson, “Subnational Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Russian Gubernatorial Appointments,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 4 (2012): 1023–1037.

65. For a theoretical account, see Georgy Egorov, Konstantin Sonin, “Dictators and Their Viziers: Endogenizing the Loyalty-Competence Trade-off,” Journal of European Economic Association 9, no. 5 (2011): 903–930.

66. See Treisman, Gimpelson, “Political Business Cycles and Russian Elections.”

67. See Andrey Scherbak, “Ekonomicheskii rost i itogi dumskikh vyborov 2003 goda,” in Tretii elektoral’nyi tsikl v Rossii, 2003–2004 gody, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2007), 196–216; Andrey Starodubtsev, Federalism and Regional Policy in Contemporary Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

68. See Stephen E. Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

69. For some implications of the “good Soviet Union” for bad governance in Russia, see chapter 2 of this book.

70. See Greene, “The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single-Party Dominance.”

71. For this argument, see Sergei Guriev, Daniel Treisman, “Informational Autocrats,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2019): 100–127; Sergei Guriev, Daniel Treisman, “A Theory of Informational Autocracy,” Journal of Public Economics 186 (2020), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272720300220, accessed February 18, 2022.

72. See Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia, especially chapter 5.

73. See Rodrik, “The Myth of Authoritarian Growth.”

74. For an in-depth account of the reception of Western economic ideas among Russia’s experts and policymakers, see Joachim Zweynert, When Ideas Fail: Economic Thought, the Failure of Transition, and the Rise of Institutional Instability in Post-Soviet Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); for an analysis of surveys of Russian elites, see “The Foreign Policy Attitudes of Russian Elites, 1993–2016,” Post-Soviet Affairs 35, no. 5–6 (2019), special issue: 359–476.

75. See Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map, especially chapters 1 and 9.

76. See Ivan Grigoriev, Anna Dekalchuk, “Collective Learning and Regime Dynamics under Uncertainty: Labour Reform and the Way to Autocracy in Russia,” Democratization 24, no. 3 (2017): 481–497.

77. See Hilary Appel, Tax Politics in Eastern Europe: Globalization, Regional Integration, and the Democratic Compromise (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), especially chapter 6.

78. See Medvedev, “Rossiya, Vpered!”

79. On Skolkovo, a beloved pet project of Dmitry Medvedev that served as a symbol of “modernization” during the period of his presidency, see Svetlana Reiter, Ivan Golunov, “Rassledovanie RBK: chto sluchilos’ so Skolkovo,” rbc.ru, March 23, 2015, http://daily.rbc.ru/special/business/23/03/2015/5509710a9a7947327e5f3a18, accessed September 7, 2021.

80. For a detailed critical account, see Dmitry Travin, Osobyi put’ Rossii: ot Dostoevskogo do Konchalovskogo (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2018); see also Zweynert, When Ideas Fail.

81. See the interview Gleb Pavlovsky, “Real’nost’ otomstit Kremlyu i bez oppozitsii,” BBC Russian Service, December 31, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/russian/russia/2014/12/141231_pavlovsky_putin_interview, accessed September 7, 2021.

82. See Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, chapter 3.

83. See Vladimir Gel’man, “The Politics of Fear: How Russia’s Rulers Counter Their Rivals,” Russian Politics 1, no. 1 (2016): 27–45; Kirill Rogov, “The Art of Coercion: Repressions and Repressiveness in Putin’s Russia,” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (2018): 151–174.

84. See Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 20–38.

85. See Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 177–191.

86. On the wave of protests in Russia in 2011–2012 and their preconditions, see Graeme B. Robertson, “Protesting Putinism: The Election Protests of 2011–2012 in Broader Perspective,” Problems of Post-Communism 60, no. 2 (2013): 11–23; Samuel A. Greene, Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). On controversies of the role of the Russian middle class in these protests, see Evgeny Gontmakher, Cameron Ross, “The Middle Class and Democratisation in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 67, no. 2 (2015): 269–284; Bryn Rosenfeld, “Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm: A Case Control Study of Democratic Protest Coalition in Russia,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 4 (2017): 637–652.

87. See Geddes, Wright, Frantz, How Dictatorships Work, especially chapters 4 and 5.

88. See Jennifer Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, especially chapter 4.

89. See Nikolay Petrov, Maria Lipman, Henry E. Hale, “Three Dilemmas of Hybrid Regime Governance: Russia from Putin to Putin,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 1 (2014): 1–26; Carolina Vendil Pallin, “Internet Control through Ownership: The Case of Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 33, no. 1 (2017): 16–33.

90. See Hilary Appel, Vladimir Gel’man, “Revising Russia’s Economic Model: The Shift from Development to Geopolitics,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 397 (2015), http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/revising-russias-economic-model-shift-development-geopolitics, accessed September 7, 2021.

91. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma, especially chapter 2.

92. Ibid., 61–73.

93. See Susanne Wengle, Michael Rasell, “The Monetisation of L’goty: Changing Patterns of Welfare Politics and Provision in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 5 (2008): 739–756; Brian Taylor, “The Police Reform in Russia: Policy Process in a Hybrid Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 226–255. See also chapter 4 of this book.

94. See Anna Dekalchuk, “Choosing between Bureaucracy and the Reformers: The Russian Pension Reform of 2001 as a Compromise Squared,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2017), 166–182. For an analysis from an alternative perspective, see Sarah Wilson Sokhey, “Market-Oriented Reform as a Tool of State-Building: Russian Pension Reform of 2001,” Europe-Asia Studies 67, no. 5 (2015): 695–717.

95. See Linda Cook, Aadne Aasland, Daria Prisyazhnyuk, “Russian Pension Reform under Quadruple Influence,” Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 2 (2019): 96–108; Elena Maltseva, “The Politics of Retirement Age Increase in Russia: Proposals, Protests, and Concessions,” Russian Politics 4, no. 3 (2019): 375–399.

96. See Grigoriev, Dekalchuk, “Collective Learning and Regime Dynamics.”

97. See Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, chapter 4.

98. For some critical interpretations, see Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path Dependency: A People with Troubled History (London: Routledge, 2005); Andrey Zaostrovtsev, Polemika o modernizatsii: obshchie dorogi ili osobye puti? (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2020).

99. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

100. For a critical overview, see Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki, ed. Kirill Rogov (Moscow: Liberal’naya missiya, 2021).

101. See Kirill Rogov, “Forty Years in the Desert: The Political Cycles of Post-Soviet Transition,” in Russia 2025: Scenarios for the Russian Future, eds. Maria Lipman, Nikolay Petrov (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 18–45.

102. For a content analysis, see Jukka Pietiläinen, “Framing of Modernization in Russian Newspapers: Words, Not Deeds,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 71–89.

103. See Rogov, ed., Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki.

Chapter 4

1. For a detailed account of policy reforms in Russia during the 1990s, see Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

2. For an initial assessment, see Kirill Rogov, “O sovetnikakh i begemote,”Novaya Gazeta, June 7, 2010, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/3214.html, accessed September 7, 2021. For a more detailed analysis, see Analiz faktorov realizatsii dokumentov strategicheskogo planirovaniya verkhnego urovnya, eds. Mikhail Dmitriev (Moscow: Center for Strategic Research, 2016), https://polit.ru/media/files/2016/12/27/Report-on-strategy.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

3. See Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map.

4. For a critical account, see Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

5. See Stephan Haggard, Matthew D. McCubbins, eds., Presidents, Parliaments, and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

6. For some exceptions, see Joseph Wright, “Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain? How Legislatures Affect Economic Growth and Investment,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 2 (2008): 322–343; Alexander Libman, Michael Rochlitz, Federalism in China and Russia: Story of Success and Story of Failure? (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019).

7. For a comparative analysis, see Jennifer Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

8. For a theoretical account, see Matthew S. Shugart, John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); for a detailed analysis of intraexecutive relations in Russia, see Edward Morgan-Jones, Petra Shleiter, “Governmental Change in a Presidential-Parliamentary Regime: The Case of Russia, 1994–2003,” Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no. 2 (2004): 123–163.

9. See Eugene Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999); Iulia Shevchenko, The Central Government of Russia: From Gorbachev to Putin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Fabian Burkhardt, “The Institutionalization of Relative Advantage: Formal Institutions, Subconstitutional Presidential Powers, and the Rise of Authoritarian Politics in Russia, 1994–2012,” Post-Soviet Affairs 33, no. 6 (2017): 472–495.

10. On the impact of policy performance on presidential support in Russia, see Richard Rose, William Mishler, Neil Munro, Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing Views of Russians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Daniel Treisman, “Presidential Popularity in a Hybrid Regime: Russia under Yeltsin and Putin,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (2011): 590–609.

11. For this analytical perspective, see Henry E. Hale, “Democracy or Autocracy on the March? The Colored Revolutions as Normal Dynamics of Patronal Presidentialism,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 305–329.

12. See Shevchenko, The Central Government of Russia; Eugene Huskey, “Elite Recruitment and State-Society Relationships in Technocratic Authoritarian Regimes: The Russian Case,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 363–372. See also chapter 5 of this book.

13. For a firsthand account, see Mikhail Kasyanov, Bez Putina: politicheskie dialogi s Evgeniem Kiselevym (Moscow: Novaya gazeta, 2009).

14. See Martin Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan: Inside Russia’s 1998 Default (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

15. For an account of the period of the 1990s, see Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia, chapter 5.

16. See Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan.

17. See Evgeniya Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina: istoriya klyuchevogo ekonomista putinskoi epokhi (Moscow: Mann, Ivanov, and Ferber, 2013), especially chapter 5.

18. For some accounts, see Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia: How Putin Changed the Contract with His Agents and the Problems It Created for Medvedev,” Publius 40 no. 4 (2010): 672–696; Vladimir Gel’man, Sergey Ryzhenkov, “Local Regimes, Sub-National Governance, and the ‘Power Vertical’ in Contemporary Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 3 (2011): 449–465.

19. See Murray J. Horn, The Political Economy of Public Administration: Institutional Choice in the Public Sector (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

20. For an assessment, see Robert J. Brym, Vladimir Gimpelson, “The Size, Composition, and Dynamics of the Russian State Bureaucracy in the 1990s,” Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (2004): 90–112. See also Fabian Burkhardt, “Institutionalising Authoritarian Presidencies: Polymorphous Power and Russia’s Presidential Administration,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 3 (2021): 472–504.

21. See Treisman, “Presidential Popularity in a Hybrid Regime.”

22. For a detailed analysis, see Thomas F. Remington, “Presidential Support in the Russian State Duma,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2006): 5–32.

23. See Gerald M. Easter, “The Russian State in the Time of Putin,” Post-Soviet Affairs 24, no. 3 (2008): 199–230.

24. See Vladimir Gel’man, “Leviathan’s Return? The Policy of Recentralization in Contemporary Russia,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, eds. Cameron Ross, Adrian Campbell (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–24.

25. See John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: Longman, 2003).

26. See Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map; Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reforms Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007).

27. For a programmatic statement, see Vladimir Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 30, 1999, www.ng.ru/politics/1999-12-30/4_millenium.html, accessed September 7, 2021.

28. See Gerald M. Easter, “Building Fiscal Capacity,” in The State after Communism: Governance in the New Russia, eds. Timothy J. Colton, Stephen Holmes (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 21–51.

29. See Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kenneth F. Greene, “The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single-Party Dominance,” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 7 (2010): 803–834.

30. See Daniel Treisman, Vladimir Gimpelson, “Political Business Cycles and Russian Elections, or the Manipulations of ‘Chudar,’” British Journal of Political Science 31, no. 2 (2001): 225–246.

31. See Kas’yanov, Bez Putina; Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 5.

32. For a classic account, see Jeffrey L. Pressman, Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

33. For critical assessments, see Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Role of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), especially chapter 6; Gerald M. Easter, Capital, Coercion, and Postcommunist States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

34. For a detailed overview, see Vladimir Nazarov, “Nalogovaya sistema Rossii v 1991–2008 godakh,” in Istoriya novoi Rossii: ocherki, interv’yu, vol. 1, ed. Petr Filippov (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2011), 449–516.

35. For an analysis of Russian tax reform from a comparative perspective, see Hilary Appel, Tax Politics in Eastern Europe: Globalization, Regional Integration, and the Democratic Compromise (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), especially chapter 6.

36. See Nazarov, “Nalogovaya sistema Rossii,”495.

37. See Andrey Zaostrovtsev, “Oil Boom and Government Finance in Russia: Stabilization Fund and Its Fate,” in Resource Curse and Post-Soviet Eurasia: Oil, Gas, and Modernization, eds. Vladimir Gel’man, Otar Marganiya (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 123–147; Eva Dabrowska, Joachim Zweynert, “Economic Ideas and Institutional Change: The Case of the Russian Stabilization Fund,” New Political Economy 20, no. 4 (2015): 518–544.

38. See Appel, Tax Politics in Eastern Europe, chapter 6.

39. For accounts, see Pauline Jones Luong, Erika Weinthal, Oil Is Not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), especially chapter 5; Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 5.

40. See Remington, “Presidential Support in the Russian State Duma.”

41. See Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune, chapter 5.

42. See Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 5.

43. See Nazarov, “Nalogovaya sistema Rossii.”

44. See Zaostrovtsev, “Oil Boom and Government Finance in Russia.”

45. See Ilya Sokolov, “Byudzhetnaya Sistema Novoi Rossii,” in Istoriya novoi Rossii: ocherki, interv’yu, vol. 1, ed. Petr Filippov (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2011), 517–551; Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina.

46. For an overview, see Mark Agranovich, Olga Kozhevnikova, Sostoyanie i razvitie sistemy obshchego srednego obrazovaniya v Rossiiskoi Federatsii: natsional’nyi doklad (Moscow: Aspekt-Press, 2006).

47. See Boris Startsev, Khroniki obrazovatel’noi politiki: 1991–2011 (Moscow: National Research University—Higher School of Economics, 2012).

48. See Tatiana Kliachko, “Gosudarstvennye imennye finansovye obyazatel’stva (GIFO),” Universitetskoe Upravlenie, no. 4 (2002): 70–73.

49. See Sergey Podosenov, “Rossiyane stali dumat’ o EGE eshche khuzhe chem ran’she,” Izvestiya, June 6, 2013, http://izvestia.ru/news/551551, accessed September 7, 2021.

50. See Startsev, Khroniki obrazovatel’noi politiki, 107.

51. See Alexander Chernykh, “Andrey Fursenko popal v nestandartnoe polozhenie,” Kommersant, April 20, 2011, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1625019, accessed September 7, 2021.

52. For a detailed account, see Andrey Starodubtsev, “How Does the Government Implement Unpopular Reforms? Evidence from Education Policy in Russia,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 148–165.

53. See Ivan Sterligov, “Experiment po vvedeniyu GIFO nuzhdaetsya v novoi otsenke,” RIA Novosti, July 17, 2009, http://ria.ru/education/20090709/176794627.html, accessed September 7, 2021.

54. See Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980).

55. See Vladimir Popov, “The State in the New Russia (1992–2004): From Collapse to Gradual Revival?” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 324 (2004), https://www.ponarseurasia.org/the-state-in-the-new-russia-1992-2004-from-collapse-to-gradual-revival/, accessed September 7, 2021.

56. See Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reforms in Post-Communist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–234.

57. See William Thompson, “From ‘Clientelism’ to a ‘Client-Centered Orientation’? The Challenge of Public Administration Reform in Russia,” OECD Economics Department Working Papers, no. 536 (2007), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/332450142780, accessed September 7, 2021.

58. See Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Mikhail Filippov, Olga Shvetsova, “Asymmetric Bilateral Bargaining in the New Russian Federation: A Path-Dependent Explanation,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 32, no. 1 (1999): 61–76; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

59. That year saw the initial implementation of the federal program “Reforming Public Service in the Russian Federation (2003–2005).”

60. For an overview, see Alexei Barabashev, Jeffrey D. Strausmann, “Public Service Reform in Russia, 1991–2006,” Public Administration Review 67, no. 3 (2007): 373–382.

61According to World Bank data; https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/, accessed September 7, 2021, in 2012 the percentile rank of Governance Effectiveness in Russia approached 41, and the rank of Regulatory Quality approached 39, while the reformers had set a target of 70 for both indicators by 2010. See “Rasporyazhenie Pravitel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 25 oktyabrya 2005 goda no. 1889-r (v redaktsii rasporyazheniya Pravitel’stva RF ot 09.02.2008 no. 157-r, postanovlenii Pravitel’stva RF ot 28.03.2008 no. 221, ot 10.03.2009 no. 219),” Konsul’tant, http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_86001/, accessed September 7, 2021. Russia’s position in the rankings of the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index has declined: in 2012, Russia took 133th place out of 174. See http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results, accessed September 7, 2021.

62. For a detailed analysis, see Andrey Starodubtsev, Federalism and Regional Policy in Contemporary Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

63. See Mikhail Dmitriev, “Administrativnaya reforma,” Istoriya novoi Rossii: ocherki, interv’yu, vol. 1, ed. Petr Filippov (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2011), 198–216.

64. See Brym, Gimpelson, “The Size, Composition, and Dynamics of the Russian State Bureaucracy.”

65. See Andrei Logunov, “Administrativnaya reforma v Rossiiskoi Federatsii: osnovnye etapy realizatsii,”Analiticheskii Vestnik, no. 22 (2006): 23.

66. For the text of the 2003 annual address, see Vladimir Putin, Poslanie Federal’nomu Sobraniyu Rossiiskoi Federatsii, May 16, 2003, www.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21998, accessed September 7, 2021.

67. Dmitriev, “Administrativnaya reforma,” 202–203.

68. See Chislennost’ rabotnikov gosudarstvennykh organov i organov mestnogo samoupravleniya po vetvyam vlasti i urovnyam upravleniya, www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/gosudar/chisl_vetv.htm, accessed September 7, 2021.

69. For some critical assessments, see Peter Solomon, “Law in Public Administration: How Russia Differs,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 24, no. 1 (2008): 115–135; Dmitry Goncharov, Anton Shirikov, “Public Administration in Russia,” in Public Administration in Post-Communist Countries: Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Mongolia, eds. Saltanat Liebert, Stephen E. Condrey, Dmitry Goncharov (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 23–43.

70. See Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune, chapters 6 and 8.

71. For accounts of state-business relations in Russia in the 2000s, see Andrey Yakovlev, “The Evolution of Business-State Interactions in Russia: From State Capture to Business Capture?” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 7 (2006): 1033–1056; Vladimir Gel’man, “The Logic of Crony Capitalism: Big Oil, Big Politics, and Big Business in Russia,” in Resource Curse and Post-Soviet Eurasia: Oil, Gas, and Modernization, eds. Vladimir Gel’man, Otar Marganiya (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 97–122.

72. See Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 6.

73. For analyses of “monetization,” see Anastassia Alexandrova, Raymond J. Stryuk, “Reform of In-Kind Benefits in Russia: High Cost for a Small Gain,” Journal of European Social Policy 17, no. 2 (2007): 153–166; Susanne Wengle, Michael Rasell, “The Monetisation of L’goty: Changing Patterns of Welfare Politics and Provision in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 5 (2008): 739–756.

74. For an overview of regional elections in Russia in the 2000s, see Grigorii V. Golosov, “Regional Roots of Electoral Authoritarianism in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 4 (2011): 623–639.

75. See Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 6.

76. For a detailed account of police reform, see Brian Taylor, “The Police Reform in Russia: Policy Process in a Hybrid Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 226–255.

77. See Ella Paneyakh, “Faking Performances Together: Systems of Performance Evaluation in Russian Enforcement Agencies and Production of Bias and Privilege,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 115–136; Ella Paneyakh, Kirill Titaev, Maria Shklyaruk, Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela: institutsional’nyi analiz (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2018).

78. See Ekaterina Alyab’eva, “VShE o reforme meditsiny: imitatsiya i pokazukha,” Slon.ru, February 9, 2014, https://republic.ru/posts/l/1081189, accessed September 7, 2021.

79. For a comprehensive account of military reforms in post-Soviet Russia, see Alexander Golts, Military Reform and Militarism in Russia (Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation, 2018).

80. For different accounts, see “Crisis in the Caucasus, Russia, Georgia, and the West,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 20, no. 2 (2009): special issue; The Great Power (Mis)management: The Russian-Georgian War and Its Implications for Global Political Order, ed. Alexander Astrov (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011).

81. For a detailed account, see Kirill Shamiev, “Against a Bitter Pill: The Role of Interest Groups in Armed Forces Reform in Russia,” Armed Forces and Society 47, no. 2 (2021): 319–342. Some observers noted that in 2011 Serdyukov endorsed the idea of a second term in office for then-President Dmitry Medvedev, and that this could have been perceived as a sign of his political disloyalty to Putin. See Golts, Military Reform and Militarism in Russia, chapter 2.

82. For different accounts of the effects of the military reforms initiated by Serdyukov, see Dmitry Gorenburg, “The Russian Military under Sergei Shoigu: Will the Reform Continue?,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memos, no. 253 (2013), www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/russian-military-under-sergei-shoigu-will-reform-continue, accessed September 7, 2021; Pavel Baev, Ukraine: A Test for Russian Military Reforms (Paris, IFRI, 2015), https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ifri_rnr_19_pavel_baev_russian_military_reform_eng_may_2015_0.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

83. See Golts, Military Reform and Militarism in Russia, chapter 2.

84. See Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 6.

85. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

Chapter 5

1. Alexey Ulyukaev, “Liberalizm i politika perekhodnogo perioda v sovremennoi Rossii,” Mir Rossii 4, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 8.

2. See Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially chapters 5 and 6.

3. For theoretically driven arguments, see Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 567–576; Ronald Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

4. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), especially chapter 5.

5. See Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chapter 2.

6. See William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014), especially chapter 1.

7. On awkward combinations of politics and policy-making during market transitions in Russia and other post-Communist countries, see Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Timothy M. Frye, Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

8. For a strong critique, see Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reforms Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007).

9. See chapter 4 of this book.

10. See Ivan S. Grigoriev, Anna A. Dekalchuk, “Collective Learning and Regime Dynamics under Uncertainty: Labour Reform and the Way to Autocracy in Russia,” Democratization 24, no. 3 (2017): 481–497.

11. See Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, chapter 1.

12. There are numerous intermediate forms of interaction between politics and policy-making, but their analysis lies beyond the scope of this discussion.

13. See Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook, especially chapter 3.

14. For a systematic account, see Georgii Egorov, Konstantin Sonin, “Dictators and Their Viziers: Endogenizing the Loyalty-Competence Trade-off,” Journal of the European Economic Association 9, no. 5 (2011): 903–930.

15. See Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), especially chapter 3.

16. See Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map, chapter 1; Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, especially chapters 3–5.

17. For this argument, see Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 4.

18. See Joel Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–234.

19. For an empirical analysis, see Stephen Fortescue, “Russia’s Civil Service: Professional or Patrimonial? Executive-Level Officials in Five Federal Ministries,” Post-Soviet Affairs 36, no. 4 (2020): 365–388.

20. See Fabian Burkhardt, “Foolproofing Putinism,” ridl.io, March 29, 2021, https://www.ridl.io/en/foolproofing-putinism/, accessed September 7, 2021.

21. See chapter 2 of this book.

22. See Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 4.

23. See Anna A. Dekalchuk, “Choosing between Bureaucracy and the Reformers: The Russian Pension Reform of 2001 as a Compromise Squared,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 166–182.

24. Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 259.

25. See Evgeniya Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina. Istoriya klyuchevogo ekonomista putinskoi epokhi (Moscow: Mann, Ivanov & Ferber, 2013), especially chapter 5.

26. See Analiz faktorov realizatsii dokumentov strategicheskogo planirovaniya verkhnego urovnya, ed. Mikhail Dmitriev (Moscow: Center for Strategic Research, 2016), https://polit.ru/media/files/2016/12/27/Report-on-strategy.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

27. For a detailed comparative analysis, see Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).

28. See Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map; Martin Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan: Inside Russia’s 1998 Default (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

29. See Frye, Building States and Markets, chapter 8.

30. See Vladimir Gel’man, Dmitry Travin, “Fathers versus Sons: Generational Changes and the Ideational Agenda of Reforms in Late Twentieth-Century Russia,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 22–38; Vladimir Gel’man, “‘Liberals’ versus ‘Democrats’: Ideational Trajectories of Russia’s Post-Communist Transformation,” Social Sciences 51, no. 2 (2020): 4–24.

31. For a detailed analysis, see Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), chapter 4.

32. For firsthand accounts by former members of the Russian government, see Petr Aven, Alfred Kokh, Gaidar’s Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation in Russia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).

33. See Vladimir Gel’man, Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), chapter 3.

34. See Richard Rose, William Mishler, Neil Munro, Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing Views of Russians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Daniel Treisman, “Presidential Popularity in a Hybrid Regime: Russia under Yeltsin and Putin,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (2011): 590–609.

35. See chapter 4 of this book.

36. See Pismennaya, Sistema Kudrina, chapter 6.

37. See Hale, Patronal Politics, chapter 4.

38. For a detailed account of politics of expertise in Russia, see Marina Khmelnitskaya, “Socio-Economic Development and the Politics of Expertise in Putin’s Russia: The ‘Hollow Paradigm’ Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 4 (2021): 625–646.

39. See chapter 4 of this book.

40. See Analiz faktorov.

41. See Yuliya Starostina, Egor Gubernatorov, Elizaveta Efimovich, Lyudmila Podobedova, Svetlana Burmistrova, “Shchetnaya palata ukazala nedostatki i riski natsproektov,” rbc.ru, January 13, 2020, https://www.rbc.ru/economics/13/01/2020/5e184e2a9a79470bf49655c3, accessed September 7, 2021.

42. See Polina Khimshiashvili, Artem Filippenok, “Kreml’ ob’yasnil ischeznovenie tseli voiti v top-5 krupneishikh ekonomik,” rbc.ru, July 21, 2020, https://www.rbc.ru/economics/21/07/2020/5f16b4479a7947289fd7c751, accessed September 7, 2021.

43. See Vladislav Inozemtsev, “Priglasite psikhiatra: Pravitel’stvo RF predstavilo proekt edinogo plana po dostizheniyu natsional’nykh tselei razvitiya do 2030 goda,” Novaya gazeta, September 10, 2020, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/09/10/87037-priglasite-psihiatra, accessed September 7, 2021.

44. For an in-depth analysis of post-Communist neoliberalism, see Hilary Appel, Mitchell Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

45. See Vladimir Gel’man, “Political Opposition in Russia: A Dying Species?,” Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 3 (2005): 226–246.

46. For a critical overview of “systemic liberals” (regime loyalists), see Lilia Shevtsova, “Russia: Did Liberals Bury Liberalism?,” IWM Post, no. 119 (June, 23, 2017), https://www.eurozine.com/russia-did-liberals-bury-liberalism/?pdf, accessed September 7, 2021; for a more positive account, see Philip Hanson, Elizabeth Teague, Liberal Insiders and Economic Reform in Russia (London: Chatham House, 2013), https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/Russia%20and%20Eurasia/0113pr_hansonteague.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021. The trend of Russia’s liberals becoming an open opposition to the regime was exemplified by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister of Russia under Yeltsin who was assassinated in February 2015. See Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics: Power and Resistance, eds. Andrey Makarychev, Alexandra Yatsyk (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2018).

47. For a detailed account of reforms of the electricity sector in Russia in the 2000s, see Susanne A. Wengle, Post-Soviet Power: State-Led Development and Russia’s Marketization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

48. For critical accounts, see Anders Åslund, “Sergey Glazyev and the Revival of Soviet Economics,” Post-Soviet Affairs 29, no. 5 (2013): 375–386; Andrey Movchan, “Glazyev’s Economic Policy of the Absurd,” Carnegie Moscow Center, September 15, 2015, https://carnegie.ru/commentary/61271, accessed September 7, 2021.

49. For a detailed overview of the impact of economic ideas on policy-making in post-Soviet Russia, see Joachim Zweynert, When Ideas Fail: Economic Thought, the Failure of Transition, and the Rise of Institutional Instability in Post-Soviet Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

50. For a critical overview, see Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki, ed. Kirill Rogov (Moscow: Liberal’naya missiya, 2021). See also Andrei Yakovlev, “Composition of Ruling Elite, Incentives for Productive Usage of Rents, and the Prospects of Russia’s Limited Access Order,” Post-Soviet Affairs 37, no. 5 (2021): 417–434.

51. See Hilary Appel, Tax Politics in Eastern Europe: Globalization, Regional Integration, and the Democratic Compromise (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), especially chapter 6.

52. See Juliet Johnson, Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

53. See Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook, chapter 3.

54. See chapter 1 of this book.

55. For a detailed analysis of the introduction of EGE in Russia in the 2000s, see Andrei Starodubtsev, “How Does the Government Implement Unpopular Reforms? Evidence from Education Policy in Russia,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 148–165.

56. See chapter 4 of this book.

57. For a systematic overview of the evolution of EGE, see Aleksandr Chernykh, “Sdachnyi roman. Vo chto prevratilsya Edinyi gosudarstvennyi ekzamen,” Kommersant-Vlast’, February 15, 2016, http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2911647, accessed September 7, 2021.

58. See Starodubtsev, “How Does the Government Implement Unpopular Reforms?”

59. See Shleifer, Treisman, Without a Map, chapter 2; David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2002), part II; Andrew Barnes, Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms and Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). For analysis of the impact of privatization on property rights in Russia, see Konstantin Sonin, “Why the Rich May Favor Poor Protection of Property Rights,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31, no. 4 (2003): 715–731.

60. For these accounts, see Sergei Guriev, Andrei Rachinsky, “The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 131–150; Daniel Treisman, “‘Loans for Shares’ Revisited,” Post-Soviet Affairs 26, no. 3 (2010): 207–227.

61. For a comparative analysis, see Irina Denisova, Markus Eller, Timothy Frye, Ekaterina Zhurvaskaya, “Who Wants to Revise Privatization? The Complementarity of Market Skills and Institutions,” American Political Science Review 103, no. 2 (2009): 284–304.

62. See Andrei Yakovlev, “The Evolution of Business-State Interactions in Russia: From State Capture to Business Capture?” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 7 (2006): 1033–1056.

63. See Maria Leiva, “FAS zayavila o kontrole gosudarstva nad 70% rossiskoi ekonomiki,” rbc.ru, September 29, 2016, http://www.rbc.ru/economics/29/09/2016/57ecd5429a794730e1479fac, accessed September 7, 2021.

64. See Vladimir Gel’man, “Leviathan’s Return? The Policy of Recentralization in Contemporary Russia,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, eds. Cameron Ross, Adrian Campbell (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–24.

65. See Appel, Tax Politics in Eastern Europe, chapter 6.

66. For a comprehensive account, see Brian Taylor, “The Police Reform in Russia: Policy Process in a Hybrid Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 226–255.

67. See chapter 4 of this book.

68. See Johnson, Priests of Prosperity, especially chapter 6.

69. See Wengle, Rasell, “The Monetisation of L’goty”; Meri Kulmala, Markus Kainu, Jouko Nikula, Markku Kivinen, “Paradoxes of Agency: Democracy and Welfare in Russia,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democractization 22, no. 4 (2014): 523–552. For an original version of the concept, see Charles E. Lindbom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration Review 19, no. 1 (1959): 79–88.

70. For a detailed and positive account, see Maxim Boycko, Andrei Shleifer, Robert W. Vishny, Privatizing Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For a similar view by an insider, see Alfred Kokh, The Selling of the Soviet Empire: Politics and Economics of Russia’s Privatization (New York: S. P. I. Books, 1998).

71. For critical accounts, see Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown Business, 2000); Hoffman, The Oligarchs, especially chapters 12–14.

72. See chapter 6 of this book.

73. See Appel, Tax Politics, chapter 6.

74. See Dekalchuk, “Choosing Between Bureaucracy and the Reformers.”

75. See Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development.”

76. For a critique, see Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts, especially chapter 13.

77. For a critical analysis, see Ella Paneyakh, “Zaregulirovannoe gosudarstvo,” Pro et Contra 13, no. 1–2 (2013): 58–92; Ella Paneyakh, “The Overregulated State,” Social Sciences 45, no. 1 (2014): 20–33.

78. See Stanislav Markus, Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

79. For a typology of corruption, see Andrei Shleifer, Robert W. Vishny, “Corruption,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3 (1993): 599–617.

80. On this possible trajectory of Russia’s further development, see, in particular, Zastoi-2.

81. For journalist accounts Ilya Zhegulev, Ivan Golunov, Evgenii Berg, Alexandr Gorbachev, “Chelovek Gaidara, sporivshii s Putinym,” Meduza, November 15, 2016, https://meduza.io/feature/2016/11/15/chelovek-gaydara-sporivshiy-s-putinym, accessed September 7, 2021; “Spetsoperatsiya ‘privatizatsiya.’ Kogo perekhitril Igor Sechin,” Finanz.ru, December 15, 2016, http://www.finanz.ru/novosti/aktsii/specoperaciya-privatizaciya-kogo-perekhitril-igor-sechin-1001608380, accessed September 7, 2021.

Chapter 6

1. See Andrey Starodubtsev, “Usloviya uspeshnogo upravleniya v sovremennoi Rossii (subnatsional’nyi uroven’),” Politeia, no. 4 (2018): 70–89; Andrei Yakovlev, Lev Freinkman, Sergey Makarov, Victor Pogodaev, “How Do Russia’s Regions Adjust to External Shocks? Evidence from the Republic of Tatarstan,” Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 4–5 (2020): 417–431.

2. See Susanne Wengle, “The New Plenty: Why Are Some Post-Soviet Farms Thriving?,” Governance 33, no. 4 (2020): 915–933; Susanne Wengle, Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022).

3. See Juliet Johnson, Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), especially chapter 6.

4. See Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

5. See The Politics of Public Sector Performance: Pockets of Effectiveness in Developing Countries, ed. Michael Roll (London: Routledge, 2014).

6. See Michael Roll, “Pockets of Effectiveness: Review and Analytical Framework,” in The Politics of Public Sector Performance: Pockets of Effectiveness in Developing Countries, ed. Michael Roll (London: Routledge, 2014), 22–42.

7. See Loren Graham, Lonely Ideas: Can Russia Compete? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

8. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma, 61–73.

9. See Roll, “Pockets of Effectiveness.”

10. See Graham, Lonely Ideas.

11. On the role of policy entrepreneurs as key drivers of policy changes, see John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: Longman, 2003).

12. See Michael Roll, “Comparative Analysis: Deciphering Pockets of Effectiveness,” in The Politics of Public Sector Performance: Pockets of Effectiveness in Developing Countries, ed. Michael Roll (London: Routledge, 2014), 194–241.

13. For a classical analysis of mechanisms of governance in the last decades of the Soviet Union, see Jeffrey F. Hough, Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); on subnational governance, see Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Peter Rutland, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Local Party Organs in Economic Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

14. Although the case of the Soviet space program was the most visible technological advancement of that time, it is not unique for this period. Without claiming to make an exhaustive list, certain outstanding achievements and technological and educational developments of the Soviet period after World War II are worthy of mention, such as the production of lasers, specialized high-level math training, the nuclear industry before the Chernobyl disaster, and some other cases. See: Graham, Lonely Ideas, chapter 10; Sonja Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Slava Gerovitch, “‘We Teach Them to be Free’: Specialized Math Schools and the Cultivation of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, no. 4 (2019): 717–754.

15. For 2008 survey results, see “Naibolee znachimye sobytiya rossiiskoi istorii,” Levada-Center, June 9, 2008, https://www.levada.ru/2008/06/09/naibolee-znachimye-sobytiya-rossijskoj-istorii/, accessed September 7, 2021.

16. This section makes extensive use of an overview of works of several Western authors: James E. Oberg, Red Star in Orbit (Houston: NASA Johnson Space Center, 1981); Walter A. McDougall, Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Asif A. Siddiqui, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race (Washington, DC: NASA, 2000); Bart Hendrickx, Bert Vis, Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle (Chichester: Springer/Praxis Publishing, 2007); Grujica S. Ivanovich, Salyut—The First Space Station: Triumph and Tragedy (Chichester: Springer/Praxis Publishing, 2008); Cold War Space Sleuths: The Untold Secrets of the Soviet Space Program, ed. Dominic Phelan (Chichester: Springer/Praxis Publishing, 2012); for Russian-language sources, see Nikolai Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos: kosmicheskie dnevniki generala Kamanina, 4 vols. (Moscow: Infotekst-M, 1997); Yaroslav Golovanov, Korolev: mify i fakty (Moscow: Nauka, 1994).

17. For some details, see Golovanov, Korolev, 583, 595, 731; Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, Vol. 3: Hot Days of the Cold War (Washington, DC: NASA History Division, 2009), 207.

18. These issues are reflected in Khrushchev’s biographies. See William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), especially 480–506.

19. For critical assessments, see Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, 129–132, 616–619; David Jouravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

20. See Golovanov, Korolev, 569, 718; Chertok, Rockets and People, 340; for an insider’s account, see Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 1, 154–155.

21. See Slava Gerovitch, “Why Are We Telling Lies? The Creation of Soviet Space History Myths,” Russian Review 70, no. 3 (2011): 460–484.

22. For a critical account, see Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), chapter 4.

23. See Siddiqui, Challenge to Apollo.

24. See Ivanovich, Salyut—The First Space Station.

25. See Hendrickx, Vis, Energiya—Buran.

26. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma; Roll, “Pockets of Effectiveness.”

27. See Roll, “Comparative Analysis.”

28. See Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, chapter 4.

29. For a detailed analysis, see Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy Story of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

30. For a skeptical account, see Katri Pynnöniemi, “Science Fiction: President Medvedev’s Campaign for Russia’s ‘Technological Modernization,’” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 22, no. 4 (2014): 605–626.

31. See Graham, Lonely Ideas, chapter 19.

32. For some details, see Svetlana Reiter, Ivan Golunov, “Rassledovanie RBK: chto sluchilos’ so Skolkovo,” rbc.ru, March 24, 2015, https://www.rbc.ru/special/business/23/03/2015/5509710a9a7947327e5f3a18, accessed September 7, 2021.

33. See Alexei Navalny, “Byt’ dochkoi Putina,” navalny.com, April 7, 2015, https://navalny.com/p/4185/, accessed September 7, 2021.

34. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma; Institutions Count: Their Role and Significance in Latin American Development, eds. Alejandro Portes, Lori D. Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Roll, ed., The Politics of Public Sector Performance.

35. See chapter 2 of this book.

36. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), especially chapter 3.

37. See Matrin Muller, “Higher, Larger, Costlier: Sochi and the 2014 Winter Olympics,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 143 (2014); Robert W. Orttung, Sufian Zhemukhov, “The 2014 Sochi Olympic Mega-Project and Russia’s Political Economy,” East European Politics 30, no. 2 (2014): 175–191.

38. For a comparative analysis, see Jason Brownlee, “Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies,” World Politics 59, no. 4 (2007): 595–628.

39. See Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 567–576.

40. See Analiz faktorov realizatsii dokumentov strategicheskogo planirovaniya verkhnego urovnya, ed. Mikhail Dmitriev (Moscow: Center for Strategic Research, 2016), https://polit.ru/media/files/2016/12/27/Report-on-strategy.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

41. For comparisons of incentives for Russian and Chinese officials, see Michael Rochlitz, Vera Kulpina, Thomas F. Remington, Andrei Yakovlev, “Performance Incentives and Economic Growth: Regional Officials in Russia and China,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 56, no. 4 (2015): 421–445; Alexander Libman, Michael Rochlitz, Federalism in China and Russia: Story of Success and Story of Failure? (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019).

42. See Ora John Reuter, Graeme B. Robertson, “Subnational Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Russian Gubernatorial Appointments,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 4 (2012): 1023–1037.

43. See Ella Paneyakh, “Zaregulirovannoe gosudarstvo,” Pro et Contra 13, no. 1–2 (2013): 58–92: Ella Paneyakh, “The Overregulated State,” Social Sciences 45, no. 1 (2014): 20–33.

44. On these regulatory models, see Matthew D. McCubbins, Thomas Schwartz, “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science 28, no. 1 (1984): 165–179.

45. See Vadim Volkov, Ivan Griroriev, Arina Dmitrieva, Ekaterina Moiseeva, Ella Paneyakh, Mikhail Pozdnyakov, Kirill Titaev, Irina Chetverikova, Maria Shklyaruk, Kontseptsiya kompleksnoi organizatsionno-upravlencheskoi reformy pravookhranitel’nykh organov RF (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg, Institute for the Rule of Law, 2013), http://www.enforce.spb.ru/images/Issledovanya/IRL_KGI_Reform_final_11.13.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021; Ella Paneyakh, “Faking Performances Together: Systems of Performance Evaluation in Russian Enforcement Agencies and Production of Bias and Privilege,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 115–136.

46. On Gref, see Evgenyi Karasyuk, Slon na tantspole: kak German Gref i ego komanda uchat Sberbank tantsevat’ (Moscow: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2013). For a critical account of Sberbank, see Jardar ØstbØ, “Hybrid surveillance capitalism: Sber’s model for Russia’s modernization,” Post-Soviet Affairs 37, no. 5 (2021): 435–452.

47. See Graham, Lonely Ideas, especially chapters 1 and 2.

48. See Johnson, Priests of Prosperity, chapter 6.

49. See Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma; Michael Roll, “Comparative Analysis.”

50. Hereafter, I use materials from the HSE official website, www.hse.ru, accessed September 7, 2021.

51. See Istoriya Vyshki, https://www.hse.ru/info/hist/, accessed September 7, 2021.

52. See Andrei Kolesnikov, Yevgeny Yasin, Dialogi s Yevgeniem Yasinym (Мoscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014).

53. See Marina Khmelnitskaya, “Socio-Economic Development and the Politics of Expertise in Putin’s Russia: The ‘Hollow Paradigm’ Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 4 (2021): 625–646.

54. For such an account, see Kirill Benediktov, “GU VSHE: istoriya uspeshnogo eksperimenta,” Russkii zhurnal, March 10, 2010, http://www.russ.ru/pole/GU-VSHE-istoriya-uspeshnogo-eksperimenta, accessed September 7, 2021.

55. For a journalistic investigation, see Polina Nikol’skaya, “Rassledovanie RBK: kak zarabatyvaet Vysshaya shkola ekonomiki,” rbc.ru, September 28, 2015, https://www.rbc.ru/investigation/society/28/09/2015/56087c389a794702546d5127, accessed September 7, 2021.

56. See Andrey Starodubtsev, “How Does the Government Implement Unpopular Reforms? Evidence from Education Policy in Russia,” in Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, ed. Vladimir Gel’man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 148–165.

57See Strategiya–2020: novaya model’ rosta—novaya sotsial’naya politika, Itogovyi doklad ekspertnoi gruppy po aktual’nym problemam sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi strategii Rossii na period do 2020 g (Moscow: Delo, 2012), http://2020strategy.ru/data/2012/03/13/1214585985/itog.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

58. See Istoriya Vyshki.

59. See the information on the HSE official website at https://strategyunits.hse.ru/news/keywords/81259457/, accessed September 7, 2021.

60. For an overall highly critical assessment of the HSE, see Anton Oleinik, “Underperformance v teorii i universitetskoi praktike,” Sotsiologiya nauki i tekhnologii 2, no. 3 (2011): 68–78, http://institutional.narod.ru/papers/oleinik.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

61. See Svetlana Pavlova, “Sam sebya uvolil? VShE proshchaetsya s ‘nepravil’nymi’ prepodavatelyami,” svoboda.org, June 14, 2019, https://www.svoboda.org/a/29999440.html, accessed September 7, 2021; Evgeny Sen’shin, “V takikh usloviyakh ni odna nauka normal’no sushchestvovat’ ne mozhet,” znak.com, June 25, 2019, https://www.znak.com/2019-06-25/izvestnyy_politolog_rasskazal_chto_segodnya_ugrozhaet_gumanitarnymi_naukami_v_rossii, accessed September 7, 2021.

62. For a critical account, see Margarita Zavadskaya, “Academic Unfreedom,” ridl.io, July 11, 2019, https://www.ridl.io/en/academic-unfreedom/, accessed September 7, 2021.

63. See Sasha Shvedchenko, “Kto takoi Egor Zhukov i pochemu vse o nem govoryat,” mel.fm, December 7, 2019, https://mel.fm/povestka_dnya/3680759-egor_zhukov, accessed September 7, 2021.

64. See Nikol’skaya, “Rassledovanie RBK.”

65. The official title is “The Project of Increasing Competitiveness of Leading Russian Universities among Leading Global Scientific-Educational Centers.” Hereafter, I use materials from the official website of the project, www.5top100.ru, accessed September 7, 2021.

66. See Sergei Guriev, Dmitry Livanov, Konstantin Severinov, “Shest’ mifov Akademii nauk,” polit.ru, December 14, 2009, http://polit.ru/article/2009/12/14/6mifov/, accessed September 7, 2021.

67. See Strategiya–2020.

68. Experts differ in their assessments of the motives, mechanisms, and outcomes of these actions. For a polemic, see Natalia Forrat, “The Political Economy of Russian Higher Education: Why Does Putin Support Research Universities?” Post-Soviet Affairs 32, no. 4 (2016): 299–337; Igor Chirikov, “Do Russian Universities Have a Secret Mission: A Response to Forrat,” Post-Soviet Affairs 32, no. 4 (2016): 338–344; Natalia Forrat, “A Response to Igor Chirikov,” Post-Soviet Affairs 32, no. 4 (2016): 345–349.

69. For some critical analyses, see Mikhail Sokolov, Vladimir Volokhonskii, “Politicheskaya ekonomiya rossiiskogo vuza,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 4 (2013), http://www.strana-oz.ru/2013/4/politicheskaya-ekonomiya-rossiyskogo-vuza, accessed September 7, 2021; Mikhail Sokolov, Kirill Titaev, “Provintsial’naya i tuzemnaya nauka,” Antropologicheskii forum, no. 19 (2013): 239–275; Serghei Golunov, The Elephant in the Room: Corruption and Cheating in Russian Universities (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2014). For a detailed treatment of the involvement of Russian universities in production of fake dissertations and other instances of academic dishonesty collected by the Dissernet community of scholars and experts, see “Disseropediya rossiiskikh vuzov: rossiiskie vuzy pod lupoi Disserneta,” dissernet.org, http://rosvuz.dissernet.org/, accessed September 7, 2021.

70. On the Chinese experience, see Guanzi Shen, “Building World-Class Universities in China: From the View of National Strategies,” Global University Network for Innovation, May 30, 2018, www.guninetwork.org/articles/building-world-class-universities-china-view-national-strategies, accessed September 7, 2021.

71. For a highly critical account of the School of Advanced Studies, see Natalia Savelyeva, “How ‘Love What You Do’ Went Wrong in an ‘Academic Sweatshop’ in Siberia,” Opendemocracy.net, March 13, 2020, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/how-love-what-you-do-went-wrong-in-an-academic-sweatshop-in-siberia/, accessed September 7, 2021. For self-presentation by the school, see its official website, https://sas.utmn.ru/ru/, accessed September 7, 2021.

72. In 2019, the number of Russian universities listed in the Times Higher Education ranking tables was thirty-nine, compared to two in 2012. In the QS World University Rankings, there were thirty-six (compared to fourteen in 2012), and in the ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as the Shanghai ranking) there were sixteen universities (compared to two in 2012). See https://www.5top100.ru/rankings/, accessed September 7, 2021.

73. See Igor Chirikov, Does Conflict of Interest Distort Global University Rankings? Research & Occasional Paper Series CSHE 5:2021 (Berkeley: Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2021), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hk672nh, accessed September 7, 2021.

74. Programma Prioritet 2030, https://minobrnauki.gov.ru/action/priority2030/, accessed February 18, 2022.

75. See Paul J. DiMaggio, Walter W. Powell, “The ‘Iron Cage’ Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Analysis,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 2 (1983): 149.

76. Ibid.

77. See Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 20–38.

78. See chapter 3 of this book.

79. For a critical account, see Sergei Medvedev, The Return of the Russian Leviathan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

Chapter 7

1. According to Levada-Center mass surveys, the Soviet-style political and economic system is perceived by many Russians as the only relevant and desirable alternative to the status quo. In January 2016, 37 percent of all respondents in a nationwide survey (N = 1600) opted for the Soviet system as the best model, 23 percent supported the status quo, and 13 percent choose Western-style democracy. At the same time, 52 percent of the respondents in this survey preferred a planned economy over the market and private property. See “Predpochtitel’nye modeli politicheskoi i ekonomicheskoi sistem,” Levada-Center, February 17, 2016, https://www.levada.ru/2016/02/17/predpochtitelnye-modeli-ekonomicheskoj-i-politicheskoj-sistem/, accessed September 7, 2021.

2. See Dmitry Travin, Prosushchestvuet li putinskaya sistema do 2042 goda? (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2016).

3. See Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Daniel Treisman, “Income, Democracy, and Leader Turnover,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 4 (2015): 927–942.

4. For these assessments, see Keith Grane, Shanthi Natharaj, Patrick B. Johnston, Gursel Rafig oglu Aliyev, Russia’s Mid-Term Economic Prospects (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2016); Marek Dabrowski, Antoine Mathieu Collin, “Russia’s Growth Problem,” Bruegel Policy Contribution, no. 4 (February 2019). Some critically minded observers have discussed the total lack of prospects for economic growth and development in Russia under its current political regime. See Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki, ed. Kirill Rogov (Moscow: Liberal’naya missiya, 2021).

5. For this translation of Nekrasov, see “Russian Poetry in Translation,” allthelyrics.com, January 23, 2013, https://www.allthelyrics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=141341&page=2, accessed September 7, 2021.

6. See Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); Sergei Guriev, Elias Papaioannou, “The Political Economy of Populism,” Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20201595&from=f, accessed February 16, 2022; Stephen E. Hanson, Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “Understanding the Global Neopatrimonial Wave,” Perspectives on Politics, “20, no. 1 (2022): 237-249.”

7. For the essence of these discussions of the 1970s, see Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

8. For these assessments, see Timothy Frye, “Russian Studies Are Thriving, Not Dying,” The National Interest, October 3, 2017, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russian-studies-thriving-not-dying-22547, accessed September 7, 2021. Judging from this perspective, the slogan “Know Your Enemy!” which served as a major driver of Soviet studies during the Cold War, has not lost its relevance. See David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

9. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 386–430.

10. See Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), especially chapter 31.

11. See Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” 493; Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 27–28.

12. For an analysis of interconnections between formal and informal institutions, see Gretchen Helmke, Steven Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (2004): 725–740. For a more comprehensive overview, see International Handbook on Informal Governance, eds. Thomas Christiansen, Christine Newhold (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012).

13. See Hanson, Kopstein, “Understanding the Global Neopatrimonial Wave.”

14. For divergent perspectives of analysis, see Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Guriev, Papaioannou, “The Political Economy of Populism.”

15. See Javier Coralles, “Authoritarian Legalism in Venezuela,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 2 (2015): 37–51; Kirk A. Hawkins, “Responding to Radical Populism: Chavismo in Venezuela,” Democratization 23, no. 2 (2016): 242–262.

16. See “Exit from Democracy: Illiberal Governance in Turkey and Beyond,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (2008): special issue; “Critical Crossroads: Erdogan and the Transformation of Turkey,” Mediterranean Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2018): special issue.

17. See Roger E. Hamilton, “Russia’s Attempts to Undermine Democracy in the West: Effects and Causes,” Orbis 63, no. 3 (2019): 334–348; Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), especially chapter 6.

18. See, for example, Levitsky, Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; David Cay Johnson, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); American Political Development and the Trump Presidency, eds. Zachary Callen, Philip Rocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

19. On the practices of kompromat, see Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially chapter 3.

20. On the impact of the global economic crisis on Hungary, see, for example, Laszlo Andor, “Hungary in the Financial Crisis: A (Basket) Case Study,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 17, no. 3 (2009): 285–296. For broader overviews of economic and political changes in post-Communist Hungary, see Umut Korkut, Liberalization Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism, and Populism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Adam Fabry, The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

21. See Hilary Appel, Mitchell Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

22. See Juliet Johnson, Andrew Barnes, “Financial Nationalism and Its International Enablers: The Hungarian Experience,” Review of International Political Economy 22, no. 3 (2015): 535–569.

23. See Dorottya Szikra, “Democracy and Welfare in Hard Times: Social Policy of the Orban Government in Hungary between 2010 and 2014,” Journal of European Social Policy 24, no. 5 (2014): 486–500; Fabry, The Political Economy of Hungary.

24. For example, Hungary was ranked as 50th among the countries in the annual Corruption Perception Index in 2010, while in 2019 its rank declined to 70th. See https://www.transparency.org, accessed September 7, 2021. According to the Rule of Law Index of the World Justice Project, Hungary was ranked as 36th in 2014, but was downgraded to 60th out of 128 countries by 2020. See https://worldjusticeproject.org/, accessed September 7, 2021.

25. For some accounts, see Anne Appelbaum, “Creeping Authoritarianism Has Finally Prevailed,” The Atlantic, April 3, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/hungary-coronavirus-just-excuse/609331/, accessed September 7, 2021; Will Collins, “Soft Authoritarianism Comes to Hungary,” The National Review, April 3, 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/soft-authoritarianism-comes-to-hungary, accessed September 7, 2021; John Stuttack, “Victor Orban’s Viral Authoritarianism,” The American Prospect, April 6, 2020, https://prospect.org/coronavirus/viktor-orban-viral-authoritarianism-hungary/, accessed September 7, 2021.

26. See Balint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016).

27. For a systematic analysis of mafia as a phenomenon, see Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

28. See Stubborn Structures: Reconceptualizing Post-Communist Regimes, ed. Balint Magyar (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019), 97–176.

29. For this argument, see Jussi Lassila, “Putin as a Non-Populist Autocrat,” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (2018): 175–195.

30. See Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, especially part IV.

31. See William R. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), especially part II.

32. On these developments, see Vladimir Gel’man, “The Politics of Fear: How Russia’s Rulers Counter Their Rivals,” Russian Politics 1, no. 1 (2016): 27–45; Kirill Rogov, “The Art of Coercion: Repressions and Repressiveness in Putin’s Russia,” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (2018): 151–174.

33. See Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 187–190.

34. See Linda Cook, Aadne Aasland, Daria Prisyazhnyuk, “Russian Pension Reform under Quadruple Influence,” Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 2 (2019): 96–108; Elena Maltseva, “The Politics of Retirement Age Increase in Russia: Proposals, Protests, and Concessions,” Russian Politics 4, no. 3 (2019): 375–399.

35. For an account of the 2020 constitutional changes in Russia, see Henry Hale, “Putin’s End Game,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 638 (2020), www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/putins-end-game, accessed September 7, 2021.

36. See Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially chapter 4; Alexander Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Geddes, Wright, Frantz, How Dictatorships Work, especially chapter 6.

37. See The Politics of Presidential Term Limits, eds. Alexander Baturo, Robert Elgie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Farid Guliyev, “Is Putin Emulating Azerbaijan in 2008–09? Modifying Term Limits under Economic Uncertainty,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 647 (2020), www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/putin-emulating-azerbaijan-2008-09-modifying-term-limits, accessed September 7, 2021.

38. See Russia after the Global Economic Crisis, eds. Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010).

39. See Anton Feinberg, “Gil’otina ot pravitel’stva: kak vlasti khotyat snizit’ trebovaniya k biznesu,” rbc.ru, January 15, 2019, https://www.rbc.ru/economics/15/01/2019/5c3df76f9a7947214d11adcf, accessed September 7, 2021; “Tsel’ regulyatornoi gil’otiny—ne ubit’ kontrol’ i nazdor, a sozdat’ novuyu sistemu,” hse.ru, April 11, 2019, https://www.hse.ru/news/science/261723973.html, accessed September 7, 2021.

40. See Ivan Grigoriev, Anna Dekalchuk, “Collective Learning and Regime Dynamics under Uncertainty: Labour Reform and the Way to Autocracy in Russia,” Democratization 24, no. 3 (2017): 481–497; see also chapter 4 of this book.

41. For analysis of the case of police reform in Russia, which was loudly announced by Dmitry Medvedev but had a negligible effect, see Brian Taylor, “The Police Reform in Russia: Policy Process in a Hybrid Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 226–255.

42. See Mikhail Sokolov, “Can Russian Research Policy Be Called Neoliberal? A Study in the Comparative Sociology of Quantification,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 989–1009; Katerina Guba, Angelika Tsivinskaya, “Evaluating the Evaluators in Russia: When Academic Citizenship Fails,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1010–1036.

43. On “regulatory capture,” see George J. Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3–21.

44. See “Obshchestvennyi sovet pri Ministerstve prirodnykh resursov i ekologii Rossiiskoi Federatsii,” Doklad No.2, Rabochaya gruppa po realizatsii mekhanizma “regulyatornoi gil’otiny,” July 17, 2020 (document, author’s archive). I would like to thank Angelina Davydova for this valuable information.

45. For a critical account of Gref’s approach to digitalization, see Jardar ØstbØ, “Hybrid Surveillance Capitalism: Sber’s Model for Russia’s Modernization,” Post-Soviet Affairs 37, no. 5 (2021): 435–452. The criticism became much stronger in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when digital technologies were arbitrarily and rather ineffectively used by the Russian subnational authorities for control over the movement of people in big cities.

46. For an overview, see Carolina Vendil Pallin, “Internet Control through Ownership: The Case of Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 33, no. 1 (2017): 16–33.

47. See “Rostelekom zakryl natsional’nyi poiskovik ‘Sputnik,’” Kommersant, September 8, 2020, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4483248, accessed September 7, 2021.

48. See Lada Shamardina, “‘Pomenyaite vash algoritm’: Duma otlozhila vopros o ‘Yandex. Novostyakh,’” The Bell, August 19, 2019, https://thebell.io/pomenyajte-vash-algoritm-gosduma-otlozhila-vopros-o-yandeks-novostyah/, accessed September 7, 2021.

49. For various assessments, see Larry Diamond, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom: The Threat of Postmodern Totalitarianism,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 1 (2019): 20–24; Towards Digital Enlightenment: The Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution, ed. Dirk Helbing (Cham: Springer Nature, 2019).

50. See Leonid Volkov, “Kto zarabotaet na ‘pakete Yarovoi,’” leonidvolkov.ru, August 3, 2016, https://www.leonidvolkov.ru/p/160/, accessed September 7, 2021; Mariya Plyusnina, “Blokirovka Youtube mozhet sozdat’ okolorevoluyutsionnuyu situatsiyu,” znak.com, December 25, 2019, https://www.znak.com/2019-12-25/pochemu_rossiyskim_vlastyam_vazhno_nauchitsya_tochechno_otklyuchat_internet_k_2021_godu, accessed September 7, 2021.

51. See Matt Burgess, “This Is Why Russia’s Attempts to Block Telegram Have Failed,” Wired, April 28, 2018, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/telegram-in-russia-blocked-web-app-ban-facebook-twitter-google, accessed September 7, 2021; Ksenia Ermoshina, Francesca Musiani, “The Telegram Ban: How Censorship ‘Made in Russia’ Faced Global Internet,” First Monday 26, no. 5 (2021), https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03215281/document, accessed September 9, 2021.

52. See Mark Krutov, Robert Coalson, “The Insulted and the Injured: ‘Streisand Effect’ Dulls Impact of Law on Dissing Russian Authorities,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 6, 2019, https://www.rferl.org/a/streisand-effect-dulls-impact-of-insult-law-putin/30202144.html, accessed September 7, 2021.

53. See Tatyana Vasil’chuk, “‘Mishki’ na servere. Kak onlain-golosovanie privelo v Mosgordumu kandidatov, podderzhannykh ‘Edinoi Rossiei,’” Novaya gazeta, September 12, 2019, https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/09/12/81950-mishki-na-servere, accessed September 7, 2021.

54. For a description, see Dmitry Kuznets, Alexander Ershov, “Tak vse-taki byli fal’sifikatsii na elektronnom golosovanii—ili vlasti prosto mobilizovali na nego bol’she svoikh storonnikov?,” meduza.io, September 24, 2021, https://meduza.io/feature/2021/09/24/tak-vse-taki-byli-falsifikatsii-na-elektronnom-golosovanii-ili-vlasti-prosto-mobilizovali-na-nego-bolshe-svoih-storonnikov, accessed February 16, 2022. For a discussion, see Andrei Yu. Buzin, Alexander A. Isavnin, Dmitry A. Kuznetsov, Dmitry V. Nesterov, Boris V. Ovchinnikov, Oleg Ch. Reut, Aleksei V. Rybin, Viktor L. Tolstoguzov, Yevgeny V. Fedin, “Experience and Prospects of Remote Electronic Voting,” Electoral Politics 2, no. 6 (2021): 9, https://electoralpolitics.org/en/articles/distantsionnoe-elektronnoe-golosovanie-opyt-i-perspektivy/, accessed February 16, 2022.

55. For in-depth analyses, see Carolina Schlaufer, “Why Do Non-Democratic Regimes Promote E-Participation? The Case of Moscow Active Citizen Online Voting Platform,” Governance 34, no. 3 (2021): 821–836; Daria Gritsenko, Andrey Indukaev, “Digitalising City Governance in Russia: The Case of the ‘Active Citizen’ Platform,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1102–1124.

56. On the use of digitalization by Moscow city government in other policy areas, see Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Nisan Gorgulu, “Digital Technologies and Authoritarian Regimes: A Case of Pothole Management in Moscow,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 661 (2020), https://www.ponarseurasia.org/digital-technologies-and-authoritarian-regimes-a-case-of-pothole-management-in-moscow/, accessed September 9, 2020.

57. For an overview, see Andrey Starodubtsev, Federalism and Regional Policy in Contemporary Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

58. See Alexander Libman, Andrei Yakovlev, “A Centralist Approach to Regional Development: The Case of the Russian Ministry for the Development of the Far East,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1125–1148.

59. See Andrei Yakovlev, Lev Freinkman, Sergey Makarov, Victor Pogodaev, “How Do Russia’s Regions Adjust to External Shocks? Evidence from the Republic of Tatarstan,” Problems of Post-Communism 67, no. 4–5 (2020): 417–431.

60. On the large-scale program of housing renovation in Moscow, see Regina Smyth, “How the Kremlin Is Using the Moscow Renovation Project to Reward and Punish Voters,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 513 (2017), http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/kremlin-using-moscow-renovation-project-reward-punish-voters, accessed September 7, 2021. See also Marina Khmelnitskaya, Emmirosa Ihalainen, “Urban Governance in Russia: The Case of Moscow Territorial Development and Housing Renovation,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1149–1175.

61. For these accounts, see Daria Dimke, Aleksey Gilev, “‘No Time for Quality’: Mechanisms of Local Governance in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1060–1079; Margarita Zavadskaya, Lev Shilov, “Providing Goods and Votes? Federal Elections and the Quality of Local Governance in Russia” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1037–1059.

62. On “participatory authoritarianism” in China and Russia, see Catherine Owen, “Participatory Authoritarianism: From Bureaucratic Transformation to Civic Participation in China and Russia,” Review of International Studies 246, no. 4 (2020): 415–434.

63. For a detailed account of the effects of participatory budgeting projects in Russia, see Ivan Shulga, Lev Shilov, Anna Sukhova, Peter Pojarski, “Can Local Participatory Programs Enhance Public Confidence: Insights from the Local Initiatives Support Program in Russia,” World Bank Discussion Papers, no. 1931 (2019), https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/31810, accessed September 7, 2021.

64. For an empirical evidence, see Leonid Polishchuk, Alexander Rubin, Igor Shagalov, “Managing Collective Action: Government-Sponsored Community Initiatives in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1176–1209.

65. On the “triple transition,” see Claus Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe,” Social Research 58, no. 4 (1991): 865–892.

66. On state capture in post-Communist countries, see Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–234.

67. See M. Steven Fish, “The Determinants of Economic Reforms in the Postcommunist World,” East European Politics and Societies 12, no. 1 (1998): 31–78; Michael McFaul, “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Non-Cooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 54, no. 2 (2002): 212–244; Timothy M. Frye, Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Kirill Rogov, “Krizis perekhoda: Oktyabr’ 1993 i uroki makroistorii,” Inliberty.ru, October 6, 2018, https://www.inliberty.ru/magazine/issue8/, accessed September 7, 2021.

68. For some evidence, see Eric Hanley, Natasha Yershova, Richard Anderson, “Russia—Old Wine in a New Bottle? The Circulation and Reproduction of Russian Elites, 1983–1993,” Theory and Society 24, no. 5 (1995): 639–668; Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Stephen White, “From Soviet Nomenklatura to Russian Elite,” Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 5 (1996): 711–733.

69. For firsthand accounts, see Petr Aven, Alfred Kokh, Gaidar’s Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation in Russia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).

70. For various assessments, see Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown Business, 2000).

71. See Neil Abrams, M. Steven Fish, “Policies First, Institutions Second: Lessons from Estonia’s Economic Reforms,” Post-Soviet Affairs 31, no. 6 (2015): 491–513.

72. See Anton Steen, Between Past and Future: Elites, Democracy, and the State in Post-Communist Countries. A Comparison of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997).

73. For some survey data, see Joakim Ekman, Kjetil Duvold, “Ethnic Divides in the Baltic States: Political Orientations after the Russian-Ukrainian Crisis,” in Crises in the Post-Soviet Space: From the Dissolution of the Soviet Union to the Conflict in Ukraine, eds. Fexit Jaitner, Tina Olteanu, Tobias Spöri (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 121–135.

74. For these accounts, see Juan J. Linz, Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transitions and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), chapter 20; David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). For a critical assessment, see James Hughes, “‘Exit’ in Deeply Divided Societies: Regimes of Discrimination in Estonia and Latvia,” Journal of Common Market Studies 43, no. 4 (2005): 739–762.

75. On the advantages of relative backwardness, see Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

76. See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “The Quest for Good Governance: Learning from Virtuous Circles,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 95–109; Fredrika Björklund, “E-Government and Moral Citizenship: The Case of Estonia,” Citizenship Studies 20, no. 6–7 (2016): 914–931; Valts Kalnins, “The World’s Smallest Virtuous Circle: Estonia,” in Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption, eds. Alina Mingui-Pippidi, Michael Johnston (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017), 102–127.

77. For similar observations, see Lucan Ahmad Way, Adam Casey, “The Structural Sources of Postcommunist Regime Trajectories,” Post-Soviet Affairs 34, no. 5 (2018): 317–332.

78. For some accounts, see Stephen Jones, Georgia: A Political History since Independence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); Jonathan Wheatley, Georgia from the National Awakening to the Rose Revolution: Delayed Transition in the Former Soviet Union (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

79. For a detailed account, see Larisa Burakova, Pochemu u Gruzii poluchilos’ (Moscow: United Press, 2011). See also Alexander Kupatadze, “The Quest for Good Governance: Georgia’s Break with the Past,” Journal of Democracy 27, no.1 (2016): 110–123.

80. See Vladimir Fedorin, Doroga k svobode: besedy s Kakhoi Bendukidze (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2015).

81. For the self-presentation of Georgian reformers, see Nika Gilauri, Practical Economics: Economic Transformation and Government Reform in Georgia, 2004–2012 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For a more critical account, see Lincoln Mitchell, “Compromising Democracy: State Building in Saakashvili’s Georgia,” Central Asian Survey 28, no. 2 (2009): 171–183.

82. For an in-depth analysis, see Ketevan Bolkvadze, “Hitting the Saturation Point: Unpacking the Politics of Bureaucratic Reforms in Hybrid Regimes,” Democratization 24, no. 4 (2017): 751–769.

83. For a critical account, see Kornely Kakachia, Bidzina Lebanidze, “Georgia’s Dangerous Slide Away from Democracy,” Carnegie Europe, December 10, 2019, https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/80542, accessed September 7, 2021.

84. For some accounts, see Andrew Wilson, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Paul D’Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007); Lucan A. Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), chapter 3.

85. For a critical assessment, see Serhiy Kudelia, “The Maidan and Beyond: The House That Yanukovych Built,” Journal of Democracy 25, no. 3 (2014): 19–34.

86. For some accounts, see Oleksandr Fisun, “The Future of Ukraine’s Neopatrimonial Democracy,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 394 (2015), http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/future-ukraine-neopatrimonial-democracy, accessed September 7, 2021; Beyond Euromaidan: Comparative Perspective of Advancing Reforms in Ukraine, eds. Henry E. Hale, Robert W. Orttung (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

87. On the impact of oligarchs, see Judy Dempsey, “The Long Road to Dismantling Ukraine’s Oligarchic Democracy,” Carnegie Europe, April 16, 2015, https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/59798, accessed September 7, 2021; Heiko Pleines, “Oligarchs and Politics in Ukraine,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 24, no. 1 (2016): 105–127; Satu Kahkonen, “What Is the Cost of Crony Capitalism for Ukraine?,” The World Bank, March 15, 2018, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/opinion/2018/03/15/what-is-the-cost-of-crony-capitalism-for-ukraine, accessed September 7, 2021.

88. For a detailed account, see Maria Popova, Daniel Beers, “No Revolution of Dignity for Ukraine’s Judges: Judicial Reform after Euromaidan,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 28, no. 1 (2020): 113–142.

89. See Scott Radnitz, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

90. On these issues, see Maria Popova, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies: A Study of Courts in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

91. For a more detailed account of challenges to the quality of governance in the post-Soviet region, see The Struggle for Good Governance in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, eds. Michael Emerson, Denis Genusa, Tamara Kovziridze, Veronica Movchan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).

92. See William R. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Gero Erdmann, Ulf Engel, Neopatrimonialism Revisited: Beyond a Catch-All Concept (Hamburg: German Institute for Global and Area Studies, 2006), GIGA Working Paper no. 16, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/71729549.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.

93. On the coercive and infrastructural capacity of the state, see Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.

94. See Francis Fukuyama, “The Pandemic and Political Order,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (2020), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-09/pandemic-and-political-order, accessed September 7, 2021.

95. See Anton Troianovski, “You Can’t Trust Anyone’: Russia’s Hidden Covid Toll Is an Open Secret,” The New York Times, April 10, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/world/europe/covid-russia-death.html, accessed September 7, 2021. See also calculations by Alexey Zakharov, Higher School of Economics, https://www.facebook.com/alexei.zakharov.1/posts/3663318147058819, accessed September 7, 2021.

96. See Charlie Giattino, Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Joe Hassel, “Excess Mortality during the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19),” Our World in Data, February 14, 2022, https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid, accessed February 16, 2022.

97. See Grigorii Yudin, “Edinstvennyi ili nikakoi: chego khochet ot plebiscite Putin i chto mogut sdelat’ opponenty,” republic.ru, June 11, 2020, https://republic.ru/posts/96942, accessed September 7, 2021.

98. See “Doktor Myasnikov: Komu polozheno pomeret’, pomrut,” Soloviev. Live, May 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wztfLJLUSWc, accessed September 7, 2021.

99. For an account, see Kristina Safonova, “My vse boimsya—i rukovodstvo, i vrachi,” meduza.io, April 21, 2020, https://meduza.io/feature/2020/04/21/my-vse-boimsya-i-rukovodstvo-i-vrachi, accessed September 7, 2021.

100. See Sergei Guriev, Daniel Treisman, “Informational Autocrats,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2019): 100–127.

101. “The authoritarian equilibrium rests mainly on lies, fear, and economic prosperity.” Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 58.

102. On the Russian state officials’ manipulations of COVID-19 statistics, see, for example, Sergey Kalashnikov, “Lipetskii gubernator poprosil podchinennykh popravit’ statistiku po koronavirusu,” Kommersant, May 25, 2020, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4356084, accessed September 7, 2021.

103. See John Burn-Murdoch, Henry Foy, “Russia’s COVID Death Toll Could be 70 Per Cent Higher than Official Figure,” Financial Times, May 11, 2020; Henry Meyer, “Experts Question Russian Data on COVID-19 Death Toll,” Bloomberg.com, May 13, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-13/experts-question-russian-data-on-covid-19-death-toll, accessed September 7, 2021.

104. See Maksim Litavrin, David Frenkel, Egor Skovoroda, “Vesnoi kak minimum v 7 regionakh sil’no vyrosla smertnost’, i ofitsial’nye dannye po koronavirusu eto ne ob’yasnyayut,” Mediazona, June 30, 2020, https://zona.media/article/2020/06/30/mortality, accessed September 7, 2021.

105. This practice had a devastating effect during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 when Soviet leaders attempted to conceal information. They publicly acknowledged the nuclear accident after a major delay after spread the alarming news in the West. For a detailed account, see Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (London: Penguin, 2019).

106. On the poor quality of Soviet statistics and its post-Soviet legacies, see Mark Tolz, “Population Trends in the Russian Federation: Reflection on the Legacy of Soviet Censorship and Distortion of Demographic Statistics,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 49, no. 1 (2008): 87–98.

107. See Farida Rustamova, Andrei Pertsev, “Dazhe slovo ‘karantin’ starayutsya ne upotreblyat.’ Kak president i pravitel’stvo perekladyvayut drug na druga otvetstvennost’ v bor’be s koronavirusom,” meduza.io, April 1, 2020, https://meduza.io/feature/2020/04/01/dazhe-slovo-karantin-starayutsya-ne-upotreblyat, accessed September 7, 2021.

108. On the “optimization” of medical organizations in Russia, see Linda Cook, “Constraints of Universal Health Care in the Russian Federation: Inequality, Informality, and the Failure of Mandatory Health Insurance Reforms,” in Towards Universal Health Care in Emerging Economies, ed. Ilcheong Yi (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 269–296; Anastasia Novkunskaya, Professionalism, Agency, and Institutional Change: Case of Maternity Services in Small-Town Russia (PhD dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2020), especially chapter 2.

109. See Ilya Barabanov, Andrei Soshnikov, Svetlana Reiter, “Ona byla tikhaya-tikhaya: Kto takaya Anna Popova, vozglavivshaya bor’bu s koronavirusom v Rossii,” BBC Russian Service, May 29, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-52775158, accessed September 7, 2021.

110. See Sergei Guriev, “Kak Vladimir Putin proigral koronavirusu,” Internetproekt.com, June 29, 2020, https://internetproekt.com/novosti/item/688326-sergey-guriev-o-tom-kak-putin-proigral-koronavirusu, accessed September 7, 2021.

111. For an in-depth analysis, see Ella Paneyakh, Kirill Titaev, Mariya Shklyaruk, Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela: institutstional’nyi analiz (Saint Petersburg: European University at Saint Petersburg Press, 2018).

112. See Elena Kuznetsova, “Teorema smertnosti: chto proiskhodit so statistikoi po koronavirusu v Rossii,” fontanka.ru, June 15, 2020, https://www.fontanka.ru/2020/06/15/69316156/, accessed September 7, 2021.

113. See Mary Ilyushina, Frederik Pleitgen, “Reality Bites for Putin’s Much hyped COVID-19 Vaccine, as Concerns over Efficacy and Safety Linger,” CNN, October 27, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus-vaccine-sputnik-v-reality-check/index.html, accessed August 29, 2021; Brendan Cole, “Putin’s World-Beating COVID Vaccine Faces Doubts from Doctors and Russians,” Newsweek, December 8, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/russia-putin-sputnik-v-coronavirus-vaccine-kremlin-1553136, accessed August 29, 2021.

114. Denis Y. Logunov, Inna V. Dolzhikova, Dmitry V. Shcheblyakov, Amir I. Tukhvatulin, Olga V. Zubkova, Alina S. Dzharullaeva, Anna V. Kovyrshina, Nadezhda L. Lubenets, Daria M. Grousova, Alina S. Erokhova, Andrei G. Botikov, Fatima M. Izhaeva, Olga Popova, Tatiana A. Ozharovskaya, Ilias B. Esmagambetov, Irina A. Favorskaya, Denis I. Zrelkin, Daria V. Voronina, Dmitry N. Shcherbinin, Alexander S. Semikhin, Yana V. Simakova, Elizaveta A. Tokarskaya, Daria A. Egorova, Maksim M. Shmarov, Natalia A. Nikitenko, Vladimir A. Gushchin, Elena A. Smolyarchuk, Sergey K. Zyryanov, Sergei V. Borisevich, Boris S. Naroditsky, Alexander L. Gintsburg, “Safety and Efficacy of an rAd26 and rAd5 Vector-Based Heterologous Prime-Boost COVID-19 Vaccine: An Interim Analysis of a Randomised Controlled Phase 3 Trial in Russia,” The Lancet 397, no. 10275 (2021): 671–681.

115. See Andrew Higgins, “Slovakia Claims a Bait-and-Switch with the Russian Vaccines it Ordered.” The New York Times, April 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/world/europe/slovakia-coronavirus-russia-vaccine-sputnik.html, accessed September 7, 2021; Ladislav Charouz, “Can the Czech Health Minister Have His Cake and Eat It Too?,” The New Federalist, April 14, 2021, https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/can-the-czech-health-minister-have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too-a-game-of?lang=fr, accessed September 7, 2021.

116. For global data on vaccination, see Our World in Data, COVID Vaccination Data, https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_WRL, accessed December 28, 2021.

117. On workplace mobilization in Russia, see Timothy Frye, Ora John Reuter, David Szakonyi, “Political Machines at Work: Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace,” World Politics 66, no. 2 (2014): 195–228.

118. For survey results, see Levada-Center, Obshcherossiiskoe golosovanie po popravkam v konstitutsiyu, July 2, 2020, https://www.levada.ru/2020/07/02/obshherossijskoe-golosovanie-po-popravkam-v-konstitutsiyu-4/, accessed September 7, 2021.

119. For a data-driven analysis, see Aleksandr Kireev, “Referendum Shredingera,” Novaya gazeta, July 6, 2020, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/07/06/86170-referendum-shredingera, accessed September 7, 2021.

120. See Vladislav Gordeev, “Volodin opisal budushchee Rossii slovami ‘posle Putina budet Putin’,” rbc.ru, June 18, 2020, https://www.rbc.ru/society/18/06/2020/5eeb6d129a794743608c8c2a, accessed September 7, 2021.

121. For a preliminary analysis of effects of political regime continuity on governance in Russia, see Vladimir Gel’man, “Constitution, Authoritarianism, and Bad Governance: The Case of Russia,” Russian Politics 6, no. 1 (2021): 70–89.