Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective Essays in Honour of Archie Brown

by Pravda, Alex

• ISBN13: 9780199276141
• ISBN10: 0199276145
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-04
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Leaders and leadership continue to dominate Russia's political development. Like his predecessors in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has made a crucial impact on the substance and style of Russian politics. His efforts to use traditional tools of state power to manage democracy and marketcapitalism have had mixed effects on both.Leading Russia investigates the ambiguities and contradictions of Putin's rule from four perspectives. The volume first considers his leadership in the context of Russia's convulsive historical cycle of revolutionary transformation, breakdown, consolidation, and stagnation. The study then analyseshow normative and institutional components of democracy have fared under Putin's regime of stronger executive control. It proceeds to examine the strengths and weaknesses of presidential power vis-a-vis bureaucratic, regional, and corporate groups. The volume concludes with two assessments of thestrategic direction in which Putin is taking Russia. They explore the tensions between bureaucratic-authoritarian trends and Putin's apparent commitment to electoral democracy, market capitalism, and alignment with the West. The book helps to deepen our understanding of the cultural and institutional factors shaping Putin's leadership approach and policy priorities. More widely, it sheds light on the complexity of the relationship between post-communist leadership, democracy, and economic modernization.

Table of Contents

Preface	v
Notes on Contributors	ix
1. Archie Brown	1	(22)
Alex Pravda
2. Introduction: Putin in Perspective	23	(14)
Alex Pravda
3. Regimes of Political Consolidation: The Putin Presidency in Soviet and Post-Soviet Perspective	37	(22)
George W. Breslauer
4. Soviet Political Leadership and 'Sovietological' Modelling	59	(16)
Robert Service
5. Russian Corruption and State Weakness in Comparative Post-Communist Perspective	75	(28)
Leslie Holmes
6. Putin and the Attenuation of Russian Democracy	103	(16)
Timothy J. Colton
7. Majority Control and Executive Dominance: Parliament-President Relations in Putin's Russia	119	(20)
Paul Chaisty
8. Putin's Popularity and Its Implications for Democracy in Russia	139	(22)
Stephen Whitefaeld
9. Putin as Patron: Cadres Policy in the Russian Transition	161	(18)
Eugene Huskey
10. Putin and the 'Oligarchs': A Two-sided Commitment Problem	179	(24)
William Tompson
11. Putin's Reform of the Russian Federation	203	(26)
Neil Melvin
12. Vladimir Putin's Political Choice: Towards Bureaucratic Authoritarianism	229	(26)
Lilia Shevtsova
13. Putin's Foreign Policy Choices	255	(20)
Andrei Grachev
An Annotated Bibliography of Published Work by Archie Brown	275	(20)
Julie Newton
Index	295