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This book presents a cultural history of the politics of Russian language from Gorbachev and glasnost to Putin and the emergence of new generations of Web technologies. The book begins from the premise that periods of rapid and radical change both shape and are shaped by language. It documents the role and fate of the Russian language in the collapse of the USSR and the decades of reform and national reconstruction that have followed. The book demonstrates the inextricable linkage of language and politics in everything from dictionaries of profanity to the flood of publications on linguistic self-help, the speech patterns of the country's leaders, the blogs of its bureaucrats, and the official programs promoting the use of Russian in the so-called near abroad. The book explains why glasnost figured as such a critical rhetorical battleground in the political strife that led to the Soviet Union's collapse and shows why Russians came to deride the newfound freedom of speech of the 1990s as little more than the right to swear in public. It assesses the impact of Medvedev's role as Blogger-in-Chief and the role Putin's vulgar speech practices played in the restoration of national pride. The book investigates whether Internet communication and new media technologies have helped to consolidate a more vibrant democracy and civil society or if they serve as an additional resource for the political technologies manipulated by the Kremlin.

Over the coming years the question on every Russia scholar’s, policymaker’s, and military strategist’s mind will be whether a resurgent Russia will seek additional territorial expansion in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states. Since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and waged a shadow war in eastern Ukraine on the pretext of protecting Russian compatriots, a reassessment of the Kremlin’s strategic and territorial objectives is due. What other countries and borders are at risk? What military and soft power tools will Russia utilize? Where is Russia likely to succeed in achieving its aims? Where will the Kremlin likely fail? Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire will address these questions head on. For more than two decades and particularly since the early 2000s Russia has led a consistent policy seeking to regain influence and at times territory in the post-Soviet space through leveraging Russian compatriots that reside in foreign territories bordering Russia. This book demonstrates how this policy has been implemented in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. It will also demonstrate how Russia has been pursuing similar policies in the Baltic States, Central Asia, Belarus, Armenia, and the post-Soviet space more broadly. The book enriches the ongoing public debate on Russia’s foreign policy by providing policy and case studies analysis as well as a deeper look into the nature and the roots of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy. Through extensive interviews, the reader is also offered a unique vantage point of the often voiceless and politicized Russian compatriots, scattered across the post-Soviet space.

Demands for national independence among ethnic minorities around the world suggest the power of nationalism. Contemporary nationalist movements can quickly attract fervent followings, but they can just as rapidly lose support. This book asks why people with ethnic identities throw their support behind nationalism in some cases but remain quiescent in others. Popular support for nationalism develops as part of the process of political mobilization—a process that itself transforms the meaning of ethnic identity. The book compares sixteen ethnic republics of the Russian Federation, where nationalist mobilization varied widely during the early 1990s despite a common Soviet inheritance. It argues that people respond to nationalist leaders after developing a group grievance. Ethnic grievances develop out of the interaction between people's lived experiences and the specific messages that nationalist entrepreneurs put forward concerning ethnic group disadvantage. The book shows that in Russia, ethnic grievances developed rapidly in certain republics in the late Soviet era when messages articulated by nationalist leaders about ethnic inequality in local labor markets resonated with people's experience of growing job insecurity in a contracting economy. In other republics, where nationalist leaders focused on articulating other issues, such as cultural and language problems facing the ethnic group, group grievances failed to develop, and popular support for nationalism stalled. The book concludes that people with ethnic identities do not form political interest groups primed to support ethnic politicians and movements for national secession.

This book studies the role of US media in presenting American values as principally different from and superior to those of Russia. The analysis focuses on the media’s narratives, frames, and nature of criticism of the Russian side and is based on texts of editorials of selected mainstream newspapers in the United States and other media sources. The book identifies five media narratives of Russia—“transition to democracy” (1991–1995), “chaos” (1995–2005), “neo-Soviet autocracy” (2005–2013), “foreign enemy” (since 2014), and “collusion” (since 2016)—each emerging in a particular context and supported by distinct frames. The increasingly negative presentation of Russia in the US media is explained by the countries’ cultural differences, interstate competition, and polarizing domestic politics. Interstate conflicts served to consolidate the media’s presentation of Russia as “autocratic,” adversarial, and involved in “collusion” with Donald Trump to undermine American democracy. Russia’s centralization of power and anti-American attitudes also contributed to the US media presentation of Russia as a hostile Other. These internal developments did not initially challenge US values and interests and were secondary in their impact on the formation of Russia image in America. The United States’ domestic partisan divide further exacerbated perception of Russia as a threat to American democracy. Russia’s interference in the US elections deepened the existing divide, with Russia becoming a convenient target for media attacks. Future value conflicts in world politics are likely to develop in the areas where states lack internal confidence and where their preferences over the international system conflict.

This book examines the development of Russia's current federal system of government from its Soviet origins, through Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, to the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and the early years of Vladimir Putin. The theoretical relationship between democracy, law, and federalism is examined with a focus on its application to the study of post‐authoritarian state systems. Federal institutions shape political agendas in the constituent units of a federation just as much as those units influence the shape of the federal whole. Case studies focus on Russia's 21 ethnic ‘republics’ (out of 89 units in a complicated multi‐level federal hierarchy) using previously unpublished primary source materials, including official documents and interviews with key participants on a variety of institutional levels.

This is an analysis of how fundamental change came about in the Soviet Union and of the part played by political leadership. In its most general aspect, it is a contribution to the literature on democratization and transitions from authoritarian rule. More specifically, it examines the evolution of Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformist politician and his major role in the political transformation of the Soviet Union and in ending the Cold War. The failures as well as the successes of perestroika are examined – economic reform that left the system in limbo and the break‐up of the Soviet state that Gorbachev had attempted to hold together on the basis of a new and voluntary federation or looser confederation. The institutional power of the General Secretary was such that only a reformer in that office could undertake peaceful systemic change in such a long‐established, post‐totalitarian authoritarian regime as the USSR, with its sophisticated instruments of control and coercion. In embracing the pluralization of the Soviet political system and thereby removing the monopoly of power of the Communist Party, Gorbachev undermined his own power base. His embrace of new ideas, amounting to a conceptual revolution, combined with his power of appointment, made possible, however, what Gorbachev himself described as revolutionary change by evolutionary means. Mikhail Gorbachev's lasting merit lies in the fact that he presided over, and facilitated, the introduction of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, religious freedom, and freedom of movement, and left Russia a freer country than it had been in its long history.

This is the tragic story—presented for the first time in English in book form—of pioneering attempts to build nationwide networks for a range of civilian purposes in the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1989. It advances and complicates the plain proposition that the first international computer networks took shape thanks to cooperating capitalists, not competing socialists. In particular, it chronicles and comments on the development of the cold war science of cybernetics, the rise of Soviet economic cybernetics for managing the command economy, and attending proposals and projects to bring about electronic socialism by nationwide network. It argues that, despite significant differences, the fate of Soviet networks is closer to that of the current network world than may appear.

Russia’s hybrid war on the West has begun to afflict Western politics in ways that are remarkably similar to its effects on the “lands in between,” small, vulnerable countries in Europe situated in between Russia and the European Union. While many in the West are only beginning to understand how hybrid war affects politics at home, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections and subsequent elections in Europe brought to the fore problems that front-line states had been dealing with for years. Their experiences hold important lessons. This book, written by a US expert on Europe with wide experience in the UK, France, Czechia, Poland, and Russia, shows how this conflict has deepened political polarization in the lands in between, forcing countries to face a “civilizational choice” between Russia and the European Union. Russia’s hybrid warfare techniques are designed to divide countries through funding extremist parties, spreading disinformation, and threatening military force. Meanwhile, the European Union has not backed down in its drive to create a “Europe whole and free,” composed of modern democracies integrated in the EU market. While countries are faced with a stark choice, paradoxically, the political leaders who rise to the top are not those who chart a clear direction for their countries, but cynical power brokers who find ways to profit from both sides. For Western readers, grasping this new politics of polarization and power brokers is necessary to understand our new politics of hybrid war.

This book features a collection of essays on Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics. The essays focus on the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, his policies, how he compares with his predecessors, as well as changes in Russia’s political landscape. This volume is a present from colleagues and friends to Archie Brown on the occasion of his retirement as Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of St. Antony’s College. Brown has gained international recognition for his studies on the politics of Communist and post-Communist states, particularly Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. A bibliography of Brown’s complete works from the mid-1960s to the present is included.

Making an addition to the new historiography of mid-twentieth-century Soviet history, the author of this book has researched the history of Soviet diplomacy from 1930 to 1939 through a variety of now-accessible diplomatic, political, administrative and social archives. The book adds into the mix the memories and testimonies of diplomatic personnel. The political system established by Stalin in the USSR during the 1930s has remained in part an enigma because little attention has been paid to those who made it function. This book sheds light on the workings of the Soviet bureaucracy and in particular the role of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister, and his relations with Stalin. The author examines Soviet foreign policy and the process of Stalinisation, and argues that these ‘men of influence’ were not simply agents of the Kremlin, but were able, through the 1930s and with the emergence of Soviet power on the eve of the Second World War, to initiate and pursue their own agendas.

This book presents a non-cosmopolitan theory of global justice. In contrast to theories that seek to extend principles of social justice, such as equality of opportunity or resources, to the world as a whole, it argues that in a world made up of self-determining national communities, a different conception is needed. The book presents and defends an account of national responsibility which entails that nations may justifiably claim the benefits that their decisions and policies produce, while also being held liable for harms that they inflict on other peoples. Such collective responsibility extends to responsibility for the national past, so the present generation may owe redress to those who have been harmed by the actions of their predecessors. Global justice, therefore, must be understood not in terms of equality, but in terms of a minimum set of basic rights that belong to human beings everywhere. Where these rights are being violated or threatened, remedial responsibility may fall on outsiders. The book considers how this responsibility should be allocated, and how far citizens of democratic societies must limit their pursuit of domestic objectives in order to discharge their global obligations.

What was known about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his career was strictly limited by the secretive Soviet government. Little more information was available after he was ousted and became a “non-person” in the USSR in 1964. This book draws for the first time on a wealth of newly released materials—documents from secret former Soviet archives, memoirs of long-silent witnesses, the full memoirs of the premier himself—to assemble the best-informed analysis of the Khrushchev years ever completed. The contributors to this volume include Russian, Ukrainian, American, and British scholars; a former key foreign policy aide to Khrushchev; the executive secretary of a Russian commission investigating Soviet-era repressions and rehabilitations; and Khrushchev's own son Sergei. The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev's struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev's years in Ukraine where he grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in the mass repressions of the 1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is Russia itself reformable?

What will the next generation of Russian leaders be like? How will they regard the United States, Russia’s place in the world, democracy, free speech, and immigration? What do they think of their current leaders? What sorts of tactics will they bring to international negotiating tables, political and otherwise? This book provides an engaging, intimate, and unprecedented window onto the mindsets of the next generation of leaders in Russian politics, business, and economics in their own words, candidly expressed in focus groups led by a Russian professional. It is a unique opportunity to experience the future leaders’ candor, disappointments, models for the future, and the state of the world. They are students in Russia’s three most elite universities, the training grounds for all of the nation’s leadership. Allowing these students to speak in their own words, it shares their thoughts on international relations, the domestic and international media, democratic movements, and their government. It also shows how their total immersion in the world of the internet—an immersion that sets them apart from the current generation of Russian leadership and much of the rest of the country—frames the way that they think and affects their trust in their leaders, the media, and their colleagues. The book also looks at the nation’s recent protests and nascent political movements to show how they came about and to consider what promise, if any, they might hold for a more democratic Russia.

The writings of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), like those of other major social thinkers of Russia's Silver Age, were obliterated from public consciousness under Soviet rule. Discovered again after eighty years of silence, Bulgakov's work speaks with remarkable directness to the postmodern listener. This translation of Philosophy of Economy brings to English-language speakers for the first time a major work of social theory written by a critical figure in the Russian tradition of liberal thought. What is unique about Bulgakov, it explains, is that he bridges two worlds. His social thought is firmly based in the Western tradition, yet some of his ideas reflect a specifically Russian way of thinking about society. Though arguing strenuously in favor of political and social liberty, Bulgakov repudiates the individualistic basis of Western liberalism in favor of a conception of human dignity that is compatible with collectivity. His economic theory stresses the spiritual content of life in the world and imagines national life as a kind of giant household. Bulgakov's work, with its singularly postmodern balance between Western and non-Western, offers fascinating implications for those in the process of reevaluating ideologies in post-Soviet Russia and in America as well.

What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? Across the region, the countries inherited remarkably similar police forces with identical structures, chains of command, and politicized relationships with the political elite. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Based on the analysis of five post-Soviet countries (Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan) that have officially embarked on police reform efforts, the book examines various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing. It develops a new understanding of both police and police reform. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this study defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state’s legitimate use of violence. Police are, according to a common Russian saying, a “mirror of society”—serving as a counterweight to its complexity. Police reform, in turn, is a process of consensus-building on the rationale of the use of violence through discussions, debates, media, and advocacy.

In 2009, the Russian government launched a much-publicized new initiative to tackle excessive alcohol consumption. This has subsequently been presented in simplistic terms as a top–down implementation of policy, imposed in the national interest to preserve the nation’s health in face of the ravages inflicted by widespread alcohol abuse. The book challenges this widely accepted narrative, by showing how policy more commonly results from the competitive interactions of stakeholders with vested interests – with the state itself divided. Rather than a benevolent public health agenda, the interests in vodka production of some of Putin’s closest cronies provides a hidden explanatory factor behind increasingly harsh regulation of beer in Russia. The book uses the lens of alcohol policy to examine the complex kleptocracy in the Russian political economy, and to show how informal power networks can undermine formal state priorities. The analysis reveals the many ambivalences, informal practices and paradoxes that abound in contemporary Russian politics.

This book introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, an international think tank established by the U.S. and Soviet governments to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s IIASA in Austria was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War divide could work together to articulate and solve world problems. This think tank was a rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation, where leading Soviet scientists could try out their innovative ideas, benefit from access to Western literature, and develop social networks, thus paving the way for some of the key science and policy breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Ambitious diplomatic, scientific, and organizational strategies were employed to make this arena for cooperation work for global change. Under the umbrella of the systems approach, East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future and the anthropogenic impact on the environment, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The book shows how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

This book is a novel contribution to practice theory in International Relations, focusing on how EU practitioners approach the Union’s foreign policy to its eastern neighbourhood, including Russia, from a poststructuralist perspective. It offers a new methodology to capture practices through the analytical approach of Discursive International Relations and the Discursive Practice Model (DPM). DPM focuses on the micro-interactional features of practitioners’ social actions, agency and rhetorical devices, exploring what practitioners accomplish with them and how they relate this back to foreign policy practices. Drawing from data gathered at the European Council, the European Commission and the European Parliament’s AFET committee members, the study concludes that practitioners are concerned with the collective EU identity and how Russia and the eastern neighbours fit within this ‘Europeaness’. But they are equally concerned with normative and moral duties and collective security interests. This suggest that practitioners are a lot more pragmatic when it comes to this policy area then previously assumed by the vast literature on normative power in Europe. This pragmatism does not mean that identity, normative and moral concerns do not matter, but rather that they all interplay when practitioner consider this policy area. Moreover, practitioners ought to be cautious of using moral concerns when considering the eastern neighbours as they jeopardise being seen as a moralising power, rather than a moral authority in the region. The current Ukrainian crises are testament to that.

Can the internet fundamentally challenge a non-free state such as Russia? The role of social networking in political change in the Middle East and beyond raises important questions about the ability of authoritarian leaders to control the information sphere as well as their subjects. This book goes beyond the idea of “virtual” politics to study five key components in the relationship between the online sphere and society: content, community, catalysts, control, and co-optation. Including an analysis of the internet-linked protests in the winter of 2011–12, this book posits that there are critical preconditions that help the internet to challenge non-free states. Russia experienced explosive growth in the online audience, tipping the balance of control away from state-run television and toward the more open online sphere. Russian leaders became vulnerable to online protest movements and online social entrepreneurs by their failure to control the internet as effectively as they controlled traditional media. In addition, studies of small-scale protests involving health issues and children with disabilities provide compelling evidence that Russians were beginning to translate individual grievances into rising political awareness and efficacy via the online sphere prior to the protests in 2011–12. New types of information dissemination, networking, and protest transformed a state strategy of co-opted elections into a powerful catalyst for protest and demands for rights. While the revolution remains stalled, a new and evolving generation of internet users is showing compelling signs of transforming the public sphere in Russia.