Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia

by Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

• ISBN13: 9780521824637
• ISBN10: 052182463X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-06-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Why do new, democratizing states often find it so difficult to actually govern� Why do they so often fail to provide their beleaguered populations with better access to public goods and services� Using original and unusual data, this book uses post-communist Russia as a case in examining what the author calls this broader 'weak state syndrome' in many developing countries. Through interviews with over 800 Russian bureaucrats in 72 of Russia's 89 provinces, and a highly original database on patterns of regional government non-compliance to federal law and policy, the book demonstrates that resistance to Russian central authority not so much ethnically based (as others have argued) as much as generated by the will of powerful and wealthy regional political and economic actors seeking to protect assets they had acquired through Russia's troubled transition out of communism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Note on Transliteration	xi
W(h)ither the Russian State?	1	(18)
Apparatchiki into ``Entrepreneurchiki'': The Sources of Russia's Weak Central State	19	(25)
Governing Russia: Patterns of Regional Resistance to the Central State	44	(33)
Inside the Russian State: Assessing Infrastructural Power in the Provinces	77	(21)
Retrenchment over Reform: Obstacles to the Central State in the Periphery	98	(13)
Weak National Parties, Weak Central State	111	(36)
The Comparative Implications of Russia's Weak State Syndrome	147	(14)
Index	161