The Strong State in Russia

The Strong State in Russia PDF Author: Andrei P. Tsygankov
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199336229
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The Russian state presents a mystery to outside observers. Although Russia was the site of some of the last century's most radical upheavals, and although Russian governments are usually characterized by autocracy, corruption, and political decay, the central government has retained a remarkable hold on the vast country. Does its historical progress represent change, or continuity? How has the political culture molded the expectations and behavior of the Russian people over time? What features of the Russian state are the keys to understanding it? The Strong State in Russia provides a succinct account of Russia's "strong state" model by reviewing the external and internal contexts in each major period and tracing its evolution over time. Every era saw the emergence and growth of a strong state as well as a subsequent decline, but in each the contexts combined in unique ways to produce very different political outcomes. Tsygankov argues that while the Western perspective on Russia is limited, there is an alternative way of thinking about the nation and its problems. Despite focusing on the contemporary Russian state, the book situates it in a broader historical continuity and explains that the roots of its development can be found in the Tsar's autocratic system. Russia's strong state has evolved and survived throughout centuries, and that alone suggests its historical vitality and possible future revival. From this perspective, the central scholarly question is not whether Russia will recreate a strong state, but, rather, what kind of a strong state it will be, and under which circumstances it will likely function.

The Strong State in Russia

The Strong State in Russia PDF Author: Andrei P. Tsygankov
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199336229
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Russian state presents a mystery to outside observers. Although Russia was the site of some of the last century's most radical upheavals, and although Russian governments are usually characterized by autocracy, corruption, and political decay, the central government has retained a remarkable hold on the vast country. Does its historical progress represent change, or continuity? How has the political culture molded the expectations and behavior of the Russian people over time? What features of the Russian state are the keys to understanding it? The Strong State in Russia provides a succinct account of Russia's "strong state" model by reviewing the external and internal contexts in each major period and tracing its evolution over time. Every era saw the emergence and growth of a strong state as well as a subsequent decline, but in each the contexts combined in unique ways to produce very different political outcomes. Tsygankov argues that while the Western perspective on Russia is limited, there is an alternative way of thinking about the nation and its problems. Despite focusing on the contemporary Russian state, the book situates it in a broader historical continuity and explains that the roots of its development can be found in the Tsar's autocratic system. Russia's strong state has evolved and survived throughout centuries, and that alone suggests its historical vitality and possible future revival. From this perspective, the central scholarly question is not whether Russia will recreate a strong state, but, rather, what kind of a strong state it will be, and under which circumstances it will likely function.

Rekindling the Strong State in Russia and China

Rekindling the Strong State in Russia and China PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004428895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 515

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Book Description
Rekindling the Strong State in Russia and China offers a thorough analysis of the profound regeneration of the State and its external projection in Russia and China. The book is an essential guide to understand the deep changes of these countries and their global aspirations.

The Strong State in Russia

The Strong State in Russia PDF Author: Andrei P. Tsygankov
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780190207328
Category : Authoritarianism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Tsygankov provides a succinct account of the major periods in evolution of Russia's strong state construct by reviewing the external and internal contexts of its emergence, progression, and fall in Muscovy, St. Petersburg, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia with an emphasis on the last two decades. Each time a combination of these contexts was distinct thereby producing different political outcomes in Russia. The book argues that a perspective on Russia from a Western viewpoint is limited and that there has been an alternative way of thinking about the nation and its problems.

Russia Resurrected

Russia Resurrected PDF Author: Kathryn E. Stoner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190860731
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
An assessment of Russia that suggests that we should look beyond traditional means of power to understand its strength and capacity to disrupt international politics. Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet 25 years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs. Taking into account how Russian domestic politics under Vladimir Putin influence its foreign policy, Stoner explains how Russia has battled its way back to international prominence. From Russia's seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine to its military support for the Assad regime in Syria, the country has reasserted itself as a major global power. Stoner examines these developments and more in tackling the big questions about Russia's turnaround and global future. Stoner marshals data on Russia's political, economic, and social development and uncovers key insights from its domestic politics. Russian people are wealthier than the Chinese, debt is low, and fiscal policy is good despite sanctions and the volatile global economy. Vladimir Putin's autocratic regime faces virtually no organized domestic opposition. Yet, mindful of maintaining control at home, Russia under Putin also uses its varied power capacities to extend its influence abroad. While we often underestimate Russia's global influence, the consequences are evident in the disruption of politics in the US, Syria, and Venezuela, to name a few. Russia Resurrected is an eye-opening reassessment of the country, identifying the actual sources of its power in international politics and why it has been able to redefine the post-Cold War global order.

Building The Russian State

Building The Russian State PDF Author: Valerie Sperling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429981589
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Has the Russian state managed to lay the institutional groundwork for long-term stability and democratic governance? In Building the Russian State , Valerie Sperling assemblies a group of cutting-edge scholars to critically assess the crises in Russia's transitional institutions. Part I of the book shows that Russia's political elites are less focused on serving public interests than on enriching themselves, and examines how these elites are ruling Russia. Part II focuses on the growth of organized crime, the decay of the military, the precariousness of the Russian Federation, the weakness of the labor movement, the corruption of the courts, the challenges facing international reformers, and the authoritarianism of the super-presidential political system. By focusing on the challenges, failures, and occasional successes of the Russian political system, this volume offers upper-level undergraduates and other scholars valuable insight into post-Soviet politics, state-building, and transitions to democracy.

Wheel of Fortune

Wheel of Fortune PDF Author: Thane Gustafson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674066472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
The world’s largest exporter of oil is facing mounting problems that could send shock waves through every major economy. Gustafson provides an authoritative account of the Russian oil industry from the last years of communism to its uncertain future. The stakes extend beyond global energy security to include the threat of a destabilized Russia.

Kremlin Capitalism

Kremlin Capitalism PDF Author: Joseph R. Blasi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722220
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The first book to describe Russia's massive economic transformation for an American audience, Kremlin Capitalism provides a wealth of data and analyses not previously available in this country. The authors articulate the political and economic goals of Russian privatization, examine the current ownership of the largest enterprises in Russia, and chart the serious problem of corporate governance in the new private businesses. Kremlin Capitalism is based on the only continuous study of Russian privatization throughout the Russian Federation from 1992 to the present. The authors tracked down the story of the transition in the cities, towns, and villages of fifty of Russia's eighty-nine provinces, updating their findings after the June 1996 election. The result is an up-to-the-minute report of the largest property transfer in history and an analysis of one of this century's most significant economic transformations. The volume also characterizes the position of workers in terms of unemployment, wages, union power, and their changing role as employee shareholders.What really happened when Russia privatized its economy? The Kremlin brokered the initial struggle among different interest groups eager to claim a portion of Russian property: workers, managers, the Mafia, the old Soviet bureaucracy, regular citizens, entrepreneurs, Russian banks, and foreigners. While competing with one another, all struggled to free themselves from seventy years of Communist economic culture. Four years after the process began, have large companies learned to offer goods and services profitably and pay dividends to shareholders? Individual stories come alive as the book explores problems Russians face in structuring a new economic system, defining the ownership and governance of thousands of corporations one by one. Russian economic practices are being forged in the heat of fierce political struggles between resurgent Communists and nationalists and old Soviet managers, on the one hand, and more liberal elements of its infant democratic system on the other. Whether a few big conglomerates and the powerful banks and holding companies from Soviet days will dominate the new Russian economy to the exclusion of most citizens remains to be seen.Many questions persist. How will billions of dollars of capital be raised to retool, restructure, and reorient the heart and soul of Russia's economy? Will open stock markets stimulate a new economic order or will that new order be imposed through strong state supports and subsidies? What role will be played by shadowy conglomerates that are trying to shape a disorganized economy into something resembling the old Soviet system? The authors note the paradox of a capitalism conceived, designed, implemented, and evaluated by the Kremlin when one aim of reform is to allow market forces to play freely. Kremlin Capitalism asks whether rapid privatization has catalyzed or complicated the transition to a more liberal political and economic system, a question that will reverberate for decades.

The State After Communism

The State After Communism PDF Author: Timothy J. Colton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742539426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
After the fall of communism in Russia, most observers took for granted that the structures of the new democratic state would be effective agents of the popular will. This assumption was overly optimistic. Eleven respected contributors examine governance in post-Soviet Russia in comparative context, investigating the roots, characteristics, and consequences of the crisis as a whole and its manifestations in the specific realms of tax collection, statistics, federalism, social policy, regulation of the banks, currency exchange, energy policy, and parliamentary oversight of the bureaucracy.

Petrostate

Petrostate PDF Author: Marshall I. Goldman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199758549
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In the aftermath of the financial collapse of August 1998, it looked as if Russia's day as a superpower had come and gone. That it should recover and reassert itself after less than a decade is nothing short of an economic and political miracle. Based on extensive research, including several interviews with Vladimir Putin, this revealing book chronicles Russia's dramatic reemergence on the world stage, illuminating the key reason for its rebirth: the use of its ever-expanding energy wealth to reassert its traditional great power ambitions. In his deft, informative narrative, Marshall Goldman traces how this has come to be, and how Russia is using its oil-based power as a lever in world politics. The book provides an informative overview of oil in Russia, traces Vladimir Putin's determined effort to reign in the upstart oil oligarchs who had risen to power in the post-Soviet era, and describes Putin's efforts to renationalize and refashion Russia's industries into state companies and his vaunted "national champions" corporations like Gazprom, largely owned by the state, who do the bidding of the state. Goldman shows how Russia paid off its international debt and has gone on to accumulate the world's third largest holdings of foreign currency reserves--all by becoming the world's largest producer of petroleum and the world's second largest exporter. Today, Vladimir Putin and his cohort have stabilized the Russian economy and recentralized power in Moscow, and fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) have made it all possible. The story of oil and gas in Russia is a tale of discovery, intrigue, corruption, wealth, misguidance, greed, patronage, nepotism, and power. Marshall Goldman tells this story with panache, as only one of the world's leading authorities on Russia could.

Kremlin Rising

Kremlin Rising PDF Author: Peter Baker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743281799
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin's Russia, from this generation's leading Moscow correspondents. With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin. During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan's schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia. But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia. With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin's insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia's leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.