Collapse of an Empire by Yegor Gaidar, Brookings Institute Press, 2008, 382 Pp
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Ukraine in a Geopolitical Game Between the West and the Russian Federation
Ukraine in a Geopolitical Game between the West and the Russian Federation Wiktor Możgin1 Ph.D. Student, Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Kraków, Poland) E-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5744-8103 The beginning of the 21st century told all observers of international politics about the phenomenon of a rivalry revival between the West and the Russian Federation. Moscow’s resurgent imperialist aspirations are being negated both by the United States and by the countries of the European Union. In the context of world events, Washington loses its hegemonic position in favor of the reviving powers, which Russia is also included to nowadays. The territory of the Ukrainian state is the area in which the active phase of rivalry between the West and the Russian Federation currently takes place. The Donbas war is an exemplification of the Kremlin’s expansionist plans, because by destabilizing the integrity of Ukraine, Russia wants to restore control over this territory. This raises the fundamental issue concerning the subjectivity of Ukraine in the international arena. Therefore, will Ukraine be able to cope with the struggle of the great powers in the context of geopolitical clash, in which it is treated as the object of struggle? The multifaceted nature of this phenomenon is the basis of this article, which presents the situation of Ukraine in the context of the geopolitical rivalry between the West and the Russian Federation. Keywords: geopolitics; objectivity of the state; Ukrainian-Russian war; destabilization; Ukraine Received: October 23, 2018; accepted: November 19, 2018 Ukrainian Policymaker, Volume 3, 2018: 36-42. -
Exorcising Stalin's Ghost
TURNING BACK TOTALITARIANISM: Exorcising Stalin’s Ghost Matthew R. Newton The Evergreen State College N e w t o n | 1 "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." --George Orwell The death of Joseph Stalin left the Soviet Union in a state of dynastic confusion, and the most repressive elements of the society he established remained. After Nikita Khrushchev secured power in the mid-1950s, he embarked on a campaign to vanquish these elements. While boldly denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and individual authority in his ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, he failed to address the problems of a system that allowed Stalin to take power and empowered legions of Stalin-enablers. Khrushchev’s problem was complex in that he wanted to appease the entire Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 and yet legitimize his position of power. The level of embeddedness of Stalinism in the Soviet Union was the biggest obstacle for Khrushchev. Characterized with the “permanent” infrastructure of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s autocratic rule was intertwined with virtually all aspects of Soviet life. These aspects can be broken down into four elements: Stalin’s status as an absolute champion of Communism, and his cult of personality; the enormous amount of propaganda in all forms that underlined Stalin as the “protector” of the Soviet Union during threat and impact of foreign war, and the censorship of any content that was not aligned with this mindset; the necessity and place of the Gulag prison camp in the Soviet economy, and how it sustained itself; and the transformation of Soviet society into something horrifically uniform and populated with citizens whom were universally fearful of arrest and arbitrary repression. -
Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and U.S. Interests
Order Code RL33407 Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and U.S. Interests Updated July 28, 2008 Stuart D. Goldman Specialist in Russian and Eurasian Affairs Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and U.S. Interests Summary Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s chosen successor and long-time protege, was elected President of the Russian Federation on March 2, 2008 with about 70% of the vote. Medvedev, formerly First Deputy Prime Minister, announced during the campaign that if elected, he would propose Putin as Prime Minister. Medvedev was inaugurated as President on May 7; Putin was confirmed as Prime Minister the next day. The Kremlin’s Unified Russia party had previously swept the parliamentary election (December 2, 2007), winning more than two-thirds of the seats in the Duma. U.S. and EU observers criticized both elections as unfairly controlled by the governing authorities. Nevertheless, Putin’s widespread popularity in Russia led many to conclude that the election results corresponded to Russian public opinion. The economic upturn that began in 1999 is continuing. The GDP, domestic investment, and the general living standard have been growing impressively after a decade-long decline, fueled in large part by profits from oil and gas exports. There is a budget surplus, and the ruble is stable. Some major problems remain: 15% of the population live below the poverty line; foreign investment is relatively low; inflation is rising; and crime, corruption, capital flight, and unemployment remain high. Russian foreign policy has grown more self-confident, assertive and anti- western, fueled by its perceived status as an “energy superpower.” Russia’s drive to reassert dominance in and integration of the former Soviet states is most successful with Belarus and Armenia but arouses opposition in Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. -
The Russia You Never Met
The Russia You Never Met MATT BIVENS AND JONAS BERNSTEIN fter staggering to reelection in summer 1996, President Boris Yeltsin A announced what had long been obvious: that he had a bad heart and needed surgery. Then he disappeared from view, leaving his prime minister, Viktor Cher- nomyrdin, and his chief of staff, Anatoly Chubais, to mind the Kremlin. For the next few months, Russians would tune in the morning news to learn if the presi- dent was still alive. Evenings they would tune in Chubais and Chernomyrdin to hear about a national emergency—no one was paying their taxes. Summer turned to autumn, but as Yeltsin’s by-pass operation approached, strange things began to happen. Chubais and Chernomyrdin suddenly announced the creation of a new body, the Cheka, to help the government collect taxes. In Lenin’s day, the Cheka was the secret police force—the forerunner of the KGB— that, among other things, forcibly wrested food and money from the peasantry and drove some of them into collective farms or concentration camps. Chubais made no apologies, saying that he had chosen such a historically weighted name to communicate the seriousness of the tax emergency.1 Western governments nod- ded their collective heads in solemn agreement. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank both confirmed that Russia was experiencing a tax collec- tion emergency and insisted that serious steps be taken.2 Never mind that the Russian government had been granting enormous tax breaks to the politically connected, including billions to Chernomyrdin’s favorite, Gazprom, the natural gas monopoly,3 and around $1 billion to Chubais’s favorite, Uneximbank,4 never mind the horrendous corruption that had been bleeding the treasury dry for years, or the nihilistic and pointless (and expensive) destruction of Chechnya. -
The Origins of United Russia and the Putin Presidency: the Role of Contingency in Party-System Development
The Origins of United Russia and the Putin Presidency: The Role of Contingency in Party-System Development HENRY E. HALE ocial science has generated an enormous amount of literature on the origins S of political party systems. In explaining the particular constellation of parties present in a given country, almost all theoretical work stresses the importance of systemic, structural, or deeply-rooted historical factors.1 While the development of social science theory certainly benefits from the focus on such enduring influ- ences, a smaller set of literature indicates that we must not lose sight of the crit- ical role that chance plays in politics.2 The same is true for the origins of politi- cal party systems. This claim is illustrated by the case of the United Russia Party, which burst onto the political scene with a strong second-place showing in the late 1999 elec- tions to Russia’s parliament (Duma), and then won a stunning majority in the 2003 elections. Most accounts have treated United Russia as simply the next in a succession of Kremlin-based “parties of power,” including Russia’s Choice (1993) and Our Home is Russia (1995), both groomed from the start primarily to win large delegations that provide support for the president to pass legislation.3 The present analysis, focusing on United Russia’s origin as the Unity Bloc in 1999, casts the party in a somewhat different light. When we train our attention on the party’s beginnings rather than on what it wound up becoming, we find that Unity was a profoundly different animal from Our Home and Russia’s Choice. -
Technocrat Or Silovik Special Raport on Russian Governors
SPECIAL REPORT 26/02/2018 TECHNOCRAT OR SILOVIK SPECIAL RAPORT ON RUssIAN GOVERNORS The Warsaw Institute Foundation TECHNOCRAT OR SILOVIK. SPECIAL REPORT ON RUSSIAN GOVERNORS • The large-scale personnel changes in the Russian Federation indicates that such a situation is not only due to the pre-election campaign as loyal and efficient people are needed in order to ensure the proper result of the vote. It constitutes an element of a new role of the regions in the Putin regime, which may be associated with the start of his new presidential term. • The aforementioned personnel reshuffles result from the state’s increasing centralisation, which seems to be additionally fuelled by growing importance of the so-called siloviki. • The entire process has begun right after changes within the leadership of the Presidential Administration (also referred as PA). The key role is played by its head, Anton Vaino, as well as Sergey Kiriyenko who has recently replaced Vyacheslav Volodin as first deputy chief of staff of the Presidential Administration. • The fact of restoring direct gubernatorial election in 2012 has only seemingly strengthened their position. Indeed, it is getting weaker, if only because the president is given full freedom to dismiss governors and appoint acting ones, who confirm their mandate in a fully controlled election. • Importantly, none of the changes, which occurred in 2017, could be justified from economic point of view. Such regions as Mordovia, Khakassia and Kabardino-Balkar struggle with the most difficult financial situation. Even though, governors of these regions managed to retain their positions. Interestingly, it is no longer enough to maintain political calm (with no protests being organized), demonstrate economic successes and to obediently fulfill Putin’s decrees. -
Social Media and Civil Society in the Russian Protests, December 2011
Department of Informatics and Media Social Science – major in Media and Communication Studies Fall 2013 Master Two Years Thesis Social Media and Civil Society in the Russian Protests, December 2011 The role of social media in engagement of people in the protests and their self- identification with civil society Daria Dmitrieva Fall 2013 Supervisor: Dr. Gregory Simons Researcher at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies 1 2 ABSTRACT The study examines the phenomenon of the December protests in Russia when thousands of citizens were involved in the protest movement after the frauds during the Parliamentary elections. There was a popular opinion in the Internet media that at that moment Russia experienced establishment of civil society, since so many people were ready to express their discontent publically for the first time in 20 years. The focus of this study is made on the analysis of the roles that social media played in the protest movement. As it could be observed at the first glance, recruiting and mobilising individuals to participation in the rallies were mainly conducted via social media. The research analyses the concept of civil society and its relevance to the protest rhetoric and investigates, whether there was a phenomenon of civil society indeed and how it was connected to individuals‘ motivation for joining the protest. The concept of civil society is discussed through the social capital, social and political trust, e- democracy and mediatisation frameworks. The study provides a comprehensive description of the events, based on mainstream and new media sources, in order to depict the nature and the development of the movement. -
Elections in Russia in 2011-2012: Will the Wind of Change Keep Blowing?
In: IFSH (ed.), OSCE Yearbook 2012, Baden-Baden 2013, pp. 77-94. Elena Kropatcheva Elections in Russia in 2011-2012: Will the Wind of Change Keep Blowing? Introduction Russians have long had the reputation of being passive about, uninterested in, and disengaged from politics, and Western observers, in particular, have been puzzled by this passivity. Protests that started in December 2011 as a re- sponse to election fraud during the Russian parliamentary elections, labelled in the mass media as the “new Decembrists” movement, “the Russian winter/ spring”, the “mink-coat” or “white revolution” and described using other col- ourful epithets, too, took many observers abroad and in Russia by surprise. These were the biggest protests since the 1990s. These events raised many questions: Who are these people who have started to protest? What are the reasons for these protests and why did they begin at that specific moment? How stable is Vladimir Putin’s system over- all? Will some liberalization of the system as a result of these protests be pos- sible? And many others. Even now, at the time of writing – August 2012 – it is difficult to give clear and definite answers to these questions, and some of them still have to be studied more closely by sociologists.1 This contribution starts with an overview of the parliamentary and presidential elections (election campaigns, their results and aftermath) that took place in Russia on 4 December 2011 and 4 March 2012, respectively. It then focuses on the protest movement and tries to give some answers to the aforementioned questions. Finally, it presents a survey of developments in Russian domestic policy after the elections in order to find indicators as to whether this wind of change will keep blowing. -
Interview with Yulia Malysheva
A Revolution of the Mind INTERVIEW WITH YULIA MALYSHEVA ulia Sergeevna Malysheva is one of the leading youth activists in Russia. An elected Y municipal deputy in Moscow, a researcher at the Institute for the Economy in Transi- tion, and leader of the youth organization Oborona (which she cofounded) and of the youth branch of the SPS party, Malysheva also later became the leader of the youth branch of the People’s Democratic Union, the political movement led by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. In this interview, she speaks about the possibility of a color revolution in Russia, cooperation with other domestic and international youth groups, the Kremlin’s worried reaction, the nature of the Nashi pro-Kremlin youth group, the attempts to unite the Russian democrats, the successes of Oborona, the chances the democrats have of returning to power, and what she expects from the West. Demokratizatsiya: Tell us about Oborona. Malysheva: Oborona is a youth organization that appeared with the Orange wave in Ukraine. It was important for us that many others were waiting for us, since youth have always been in the avant-garde. At that time, our adult colleagues kept arguing as to who was more important. In the end, they got 3 percent [in the Duma elections]. It was evi- dent that they were not well presented before the Russian voters. We founded Oborona not only with young people who sympathize with SPS, Yabloko, the [former SPS leader and independent candidate Irina] Khakamada movement and other such formations—but also with those who support the democratic process and oppose the Putin regime. -
THE WARP of the SERBIAN IDENTITY Anti-Westernism, Russophilia, Traditionalism
HELSINKI COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN SERBIA studies17 THE WARP OF THE SERBIAN IDENTITY anti-westernism, russophilia, traditionalism... BELGRADE, 2016 THE WARP OF THE SERBIAN IDENTITY Anti-westernism, russophilia, traditionalism… Edition: Studies No. 17 Publisher: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia www.helsinki.org.rs For the publisher: Sonja Biserko Reviewed by: Prof. Dr. Dubravka Stojanović Prof. Dr. Momir Samardžić Dr Hrvoje Klasić Layout and design: Ivan Hrašovec Printed by: Grafiprof, Belgrade Circulation: 200 ISBN 978-86-7208-203-6 This publication is a part of the project “Serbian Identity in the 21st Century” implemented with the assistance from the Open Society Foundation – Serbia. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Open Society Foundation – Serbia. CONTENTS Publisher’s Note . 5 TRANSITION AND IDENTITIES JOVAN KOMŠIĆ Democratic Transition And Identities . 11 LATINKA PEROVIĆ Serbian-Russian Historical Analogies . 57 MILAN SUBOTIĆ, A Different Russia: From Serbia’s Perspective . 83 SRĐAN BARIŠIĆ The Role of the Serbian and Russian Orthodox Churches in Shaping Governmental Policies . 105 RUSSIA’S SOFT POWER DR. JELICA KURJAK “Soft Power” in the Service of Foreign Policy Strategy of the Russian Federation . 129 DR MILIVOJ BEŠLIN A “New” History For A New Identity . 139 SONJA BISERKO, SEŠKA STANOJLOVIĆ Russia’s Soft Power Expands . 157 SERBIA, EU, EAST DR BORIS VARGA Belgrade And Kiev Between Brussels And Moscow . 169 DIMITRIJE BOAROV More Politics Than Business . 215 PETAR POPOVIĆ Serbian-Russian Joint Military Exercise . 235 SONJA BISERKO Russia and NATO: A Test of Strength over Montenegro . -
Russia by Robert W
Russia by Robert W. Orttung Capital: Moscow Population: 142.0 million GNI/capita: US$15,460 Source: The data above was provided by The World Bank, World Bank Indicators 2010. Nations in Transit Ratings and Averaged Scores 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Electoral Process 4.25 4.50 4.75 5.50 6.00 6.25 6.50 6.75 6.75 6.75 Civil Society 4.00 4.00 4.25 4.50 4.75 5.00 5.25 5.50 5.75 5.75 Independent Media 5.25 5.50 5.50 5.75 6.00 6.00 6.25 6.25 6.25 6.25 Governance* 5.00 5.25 5.00 5.25 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a National Democratic Governance n/a n/a n/a n/a 5.75 6.00 6.00 6.25 6.50 6.50 Local Democratic Governance n/a n/a n/a n/a 5.75 5.75 5.75 5.75 5.75 5.75 Judicial Framework and Independence 4.50 4.75 4.50 4.75 5.25 5.25 5.25 5.25 5.50 5.50 Corruption 6.25 6.00 5.75 5.75 5.75 6.00 6.00 6.00 6.25 6.50 Democracy Score 4.88 5.00 4.96 5.25 5.61 5.75 5.86 5.96 6.11 6.14 * Starting with the 2005 edition, Freedom House introduced separate analysis and ratings for national democratic governance and local democratic governance to provide readers with more detailed and nuanced analysis of these two important subjects. -
POP PARADE and Characters from Films, Computer Games and Comic Strips
NO. 43 (1835) САНКТ-ПЕТЕРБУРГ-ТАЙМС WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2014 WWW.SPTIMES.RU NIKOLAY SHESTAKOV / FOR SPT / FOR SHESTAKOV NIKOLAY A contestant in the AVA Expo annual festival of popular culture, which was held at the Lenexpo exhibition center last weekend. Fans of popular culture dressed up as superheroes POP PARADE and characters from films, computer games and comic strips. The winner was Alexandra Pankova, who won 50,000 rubles ($1,190) for dressing up as anime character Black Lotus. NATIONAL NEWS NATIONAL NEWS ARTS & CULTURE Looking to Europe Putin Points the Finger Gromyka: Back in the U.S.S.R. Russian president hits out at U.S., accusing it Petrozavodsk group models style on Soviet Politburo. Pro-European parties win in of making the world a more Page 9. Ukraine. Page 3. dangerous place . Page 4. News www.sptimes.ru | Wednesday, October 29, 2014 ❖ 2 Zenit Returns to Form Against Mordovia First Building By Gus Peters of a spot in the knockout stages of the Of New Prison THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES tournament. The loss to Leverkusen Five second-half goals from Russian was Zenit’s first loss in any competi- Premier League leaders Zenit St. Pe- tion since the end of July. Completed tersburg swept aside Mordovia Saransk Sunday’s match also marked the on a cold Sunday evening in Petrovsky return of Zenit’s hardcore fans to the By Irina Titova Stadium during Zenit’s first home game Virazh, the curved sector of the sta- THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES in nearly a month. dium behind the southern goal that ST.