➜ geographical distribution of power federal union of 83 regions and republics, though increasingly functioning as a unitary state ➜ relationship between legislature and executive presidential ➜ executive president, limited to two terms of 6 years ➜ executive election system two-ballot majority ➜ legislature bicameral: state duma (lower house), federation council (upper house) ➜ legislative election system 2011-pr
2016-mix of smd and pr➜ party system dominant party (united russia) ➜ judiciary constitutional court with the power of judicial review
Russia is illustrative of many of the biggest trends that have shaped the modern world in the last century. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was the introduction to communist revolutions and the establishment of left-wing regimes across much of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Russia acted as one of the two polar powers of the Cold War, supporting and shaping similar regimes within its sphere of influence. The communist regime’s failure to deliver basic consumer goods led to its eventual collapse in Russia, beginning the waves of democratization, marketization, and globalization that have defined the modern political and economic climate. Russia’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy, however, seems to have taken a major U-turn back toward authoritarianism since 2000. Their story can enhance our understanding of which formal and informal institutions and political cultural components are necessary for a full democratic transition to occur.
Russia is a federal state, whose constitution specifies six categorizations of eighty-three different local governments united together under one national federation, with three supreme branches of government. Federalism was established as the solution to the diverse needs and interests of the many disparate ethnic minority groups across the massive territory of the country, but the last decade or so has seen the erosion of federalism as local levels of government lose more and more power to the central national level. Vladimir Putin seems to be consolidating an authoritarian rule over what was once a promising yet fledgling democracy, and centralizing control of the federation at the national level is part of that agenda.
Russia is a massive country, the largest territory of any state in the world today, even after the loss of its smaller republics that declared independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. It spans across eight time zones, and borders fourteen states, with neighbors as diverse as Finland and Norway in the west, to China and North Korea in the east.
There is also a great deal of ethnic diversity within Russia, though approximately 80 percent of the people are ethnically Russian. Despite this large land mass, much of Russia’s territory is extremely cold and dry, rendering it useless for agriculture and civilization. Most Russians live in the western portion of the country that is considered part of Europe, and the eastern territory in Asia is very sparsely populated. Interestingly, for most of Russian history, Russia’s large land mass did not provide it with any kind of opportunity for naval power or trade through the seas since it had no access to warm water for ports. Historically, this access has often been the object of Russian military campaigns, including Peter the Great’s acquisitions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (illustrated on page 131), and was even one of the motivations for the recent (2014–2015) annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.
Although Siberia and other seemingly uninhabitable eastern territories didn’t serve much of a purpose for the state in its distant history, the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin used these remote areas as forced-labor camps for political prisoners, and they increasingly served as a crucial component of the Soviet industrial economy. Even though the prison camps are largely unused now, natural resources such as oil and natural gas that used to be locked under the surface of the icy tundra are now accessible thanks to modern exploration technology. Behind only the United States, Russia is the world’s second largest producer of natural gas, and has at times been the largest.
The diversity within Russia and surrounding Russia has created another crucial element of Russia’s political culture: statism. Remember that Britain’s relative isolation as a small island allowed it to develop its domestic political culture and institutions without much fear of foreign intervention. Russia, by contrast, has been subject to regular invasion by foreign powers, and has developed a political culture that deeply values a strong and powerful state that can defend the people from troubles. Respect for rights and civil liberties has not yet emerged as a major priority of the Russian people.
Russia’s history of foreign invasion and the relative lack of geographic protection has contributed to a political culture that values a strong state that can defend and provide for its people.
Related to statism, Russia’s relative lack of arable farm land and unstable food supply created a climate in which citizens expected the state to step in to care for people in times of need. The susceptibility to famine and starvation historically has built in a deep suspicion and resentment against the wealthy within Russia. Western traditions, by contrast, often describe wealthy individuals as having “earned” what they have, and look up to higher classes with aspirations of achieving the same for themselves. In Russia, it is often assumed that those who are wealthy gained what they have illicitly or through exploitation of others. Russians often see the state as the solution to “solve” the problem of inequality.
Interestingly, though Russians often trust the state as the instrument to solve their problems, individuals who exercise the power of the state rarely have the confidence of the Russian people. Authorities in bureaucratic jobs are frequently assumed by Russians to be corrupt or incompetent. This dynamic leads to a common resignation to poor results, given that the people assume the state is the only force that can provide a solution, yet it cannot be trusted to get it right.
Events in early Russian history created a divide between Russia and the rest of Europe religiously, economically, politically, and culturally. As Western Europe emerged as the center of wealth and power, Russian political culture was at the same time experiencing a constant internal struggle over whether to model themselves after progressive European traditions, values, and practices, or to remain true to their own distinctly Eastern ways. This struggle is often embodied in transitions that occur between leaders who are “Westernizers” (such as Peter the Great, 1682–1725, or Boris Yeltsin, 1991–1999), and those who are “Slavophiles” (such as nobles who opposed Peter the Great, or perhaps Vladimir Putin in modern Russia). Battles play out regularly in Russian politics over which countries to build partnerships with, how to structure the Russian economy, and the degree to which the state should protect civil liberties such as freedom of speech and religion, among many others. It is even visible in arguments over how Russians should dress, and what types of music they should listen to.
The region of Russia adopted Christianity as a state religion in 988, and closely tied church and state revenues and functions together. Their religious and cultural practices followed a Byzantine example rather than a Western example. For instance, church liturgical writings and sermons were in the regional Slavic language, rather than in the Latin or Greek of the early Christian writings of the West. The schism between Eastern and Western Churches was formalized in 1054 when the leaders of each side excommunicated one another. Russian political traditions and institutions would forever remain divided and distinct from those that would emerge in Western Europe. The ideals that reshaped Europe during the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, which paved the way for individual rights and challenge to existing authority, never took root in Russian political culture.
The Mongol invasions of Russia established a cooperative nobility, but under Ivan III (Ivan the Great), 1462–1505, and Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), 1547–1584, Russia secured its independence and laid the foundation for the modern Russian state.
Tsars of Russia were initially princes over Moscow, established under Mongolian rule, but after Ivan III, the tsars began a long tradition of strong, authoritarian, autocratic rule. This form of government was occasionally disrupted by a westernizing leader, such as Peter the Great (1682–1725) though often attempts at reform and westernization ended in disaster and chaos internally. Peter traveled across Western Europe on a tour to learn about Western business, shipbuilding, military training and structure, and political life. He forced Russian nobility to adopt Western practices on everything from how to drill soldiers down to how to dress and shave in an effort to build Russia into a modern power.
Catherine the Great (1762–1796) held similar goals for westernization, drawing inspiration from ideas about science, philosophy, and religious toleration from Enlightenment thinkers of the west. She resisted, however, any calls for liberalization of rights to allow for freedom of speech or the press, and maintained rule as an authoritarian, modeling the enlightened despot that characterized the political systems of many Eastern European states of her time.
After Napoleon’s invasion of Russia briefly interrupted tsarist authoritarianism, Russian intellectuals came to believe that ideals of the Enlightenment could never take root in Russia’s backward political system. This conflict between the tsarist regime and liberalizing forces led to the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, which was crushed by Tsar Nicholas I and his forces. The regime was challenged again after a loss in the Crimean War (1853–1856) against a coalition of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia, which convinced many that Russia could never compete with Western European powers unless it modernized its regime. Tsars cracked down upon dissenters who challenged their rule with the creation of secret police forces, and the exile and imprisonment of political critics.
The most significant attempts at reform occurred under Alexander II (1855–1881) who freed Russian serfs, established local representative assemblies called zemstvas, reorganized the Russian judiciary to make it more independent, and ended many noble privileges. He was even in the process of creating an elected national parliament to be called the Duma. As was often the case in Russia, these westernizing reforms resulted in chaos and reversal. Alexander II was assassinated by critics who believed his reforms were not going far enough, and his successor son, Alexander III (1881–1894) ripped apart the reforms and plans for further reform to carry out a crackdown against dissidents within Russia.
In addition to the backdrop of Russian tsarist authoritarianism, two events brought about the Russian Revolution in 1917. The first was Russia’s loss in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, in which Russia was soundly defeated by what was once a similarly backward Eastern nation. Japan had modernized under a Western model, however, and built a world-class military that Russia was ill prepared to contend with. Street riots against the state broke out in protest, and Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917) capitulated by creating the Duma, an elected national representative assembly, to move Russia onto a path of constitutional monarchy.
The outbreak of World War I brought Russia into the fighting to defend Serbia against Austrian aggression. The war unfolded very badly for Russia, suffering more military and civilian casualties against German and Austrian advances than any other country. Soldiers often fought with no shoes or guns, food was in short supply, and soldiers increasingly defected and mutinied against their officers. Nicholas II was forced to abdicate the throne in response to the chaos, and the state collapsed.
Many of Russia’s political agitators were Marxists. Marxism is a political and economic ideology framed by Karl Marx in his nineteenth-century writings, the most famous of which is the Communist Manifesto. Marxism decries the capitalist economic system and private property as an exploitative system that effectively steals the efforts and labor of the working class (called the proletariat by Marx) to create wealth for the property-owning classes (called the bourgeoisie by Marx). Marxism advocates an organized revolution by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie to create a society in which all of the workers collectively own the product of their labor and no longer need to work in horrible conditions for meager wages and a poor standard of living.
Lenin’s principle of democratic centralism meant that an inner elite would be empowered to make all meaningful political decisions on behalf of the masses.
Most notable among the revolutionary agitators was Vladimir Lenin, who had written a pamphlet in 1905 after the Russo–Japanese War entitled What Is To Be Done, in which he advocated the creation and support of a small, elite revolutionary leadership of professional intellectuals who could guide the workers in pursuit of revolutionary success. This principle came to be known as democratic centralism, the idea that a small and elite central leadership would be entrusted with power and decision-making authority, but that they would exercise this power on behalf of the best interests of all people. To be clear, there is very little about this idea that scholars today would consider “democratic” in the understood definition of the word. It is much more “central” than “democratic.”
After the collapse of the state in early 1917, a provisional government was formed under Alexander Kerensky and the State Duma, but Kerensky continued Russia’s involvement in World War I. By late 1917, revolutionary workers’ unions across Russia revolted. These revolutionaries, called Soviets, put Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in control of the state, renaming it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Lenin’s rise to power led to the outbreak of Civil War in Russia between the White Army, led by Russian military leaders opposed to Marxism and the Revolution, who were largely funded by the Allied Powers of World War I, and the Red Army, made up of revolutionaries led by Lenin. By 1920, the Reds had secured victory and control over Russia, but Lenin made concessions to the demands of the Whites. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) gave peasant farmers private property ownership of their land, in addition to rights to earn profits on sales of their produce. The plan was successful in solving Russia’s food problems and brought considerable prosperity to the Russian countryside, but it did not last because Lenin suffered a series of strokes in 1922 and 1923 that led to his death.
Joseph Stalin emerged from the party’s internal power struggle to rule over Russia as Lenin’s successor from 1922 to1953. While Lenin had privately criticized Stalin as being unfit for leadership due to his excessive power and ambition, and even recommended his removal from the post of General Secretary, Stalin used doctored imagery of Lenin with himself and propagandized depictions of the Bolshevik Revolution to depict himself as a trusted confidant and preferred successor to Lenin. Stalin’s reforms placed all economic activity under the control of the state, ending the New Economic Policy. Stalin labeled the wealthy peasant landowners as kulaks, and carried out a program to seize their property under state control known as collectivization. Kulaks who resisted collectivization were regularly either sent to forced-labor camps in remote parts of the country, summarily killed by state forces, or in many cases, turned in by their neighbors sympathetic to the demands of the regime. The collective farms owned by the state would serve the purpose of feeding the cities, whose workers were doing what Stalin perceived to be the most important work of turning Russia from a backward agrarian nation into a modern industrial power. The objective of industrialization was expressed in the Five-Year Plan, setting ambitious goals for production of modern industrial necessities, including steel, oil, and electricity.
The Communist Party recruited and promoted elites through nomenklatura, maintaining a list of names of potential party members who could potentially move up. These promotions were based largely on personal connections to higher ranking members.
In addition to major economic reorganization, Stalin reorganized Russian politics to place the Communist Party, rather than the Soviets, at the center of the Russian state. Communist Party membership was selective, allowing only about 7 percent of the country to join. Leaders were selected and promoted based on a practice called nomenklatura, in which higher ranking leaders would identify promising lower-level members for promotion. Nomenklatura had substantial effects on the Russian political system since rising in the ranks of Russian society and politics required personal connection and service to those already in power. The party was organized in a pyramidical hierarchy, with the top leaders concentrated in the Central Committee of about 300 members, and the Politburo of twelve men who functioned as the executive leaders of government agencies and departments. The General Secretary who led the party would act as a dictatorial chief executive during Stalin’s time. Stalin did not risk upheaval within the party against his rule. During his rule, he conducted purges of the party in which he signed off on the execution of almost one million party members who were suspected of disloyalty, many of whom were top officials or generals he had personally placed in power under nomenklatura. While Russia had known a long history of authoritarianism, under Stalin the programs of propaganda, economic control, and political control moved Russia into totalitarianism. Paranoia within the Communist Party over who would be next to be victim of a purge led many Communists to support major reforms to loosen the totalitarian nature of the state after Stalin’s death in 1953.
In foreign policy, Stalin’s agenda was characterized by the outbreak of hostility between Russia and the West after their cooperation in World War II. This tension came to be known as the Cold War (1945–1991). The source of the conflict was disagreement over how to rebuild fascist Germany, and more important, the status of the republics between Germany and Russia. While the United States, Britain, and France favored constitutional democracy and market capitalism, including free elections for all the liberated peoples of Eastern Europe, Stalin sought to create a buffer between Russia and Germany of allied communist states in the event of another German rearmament. Winston Churchill famously characterized the military buildup along the border between democratic and communist countries as an Iron Curtain, which had descended across Europe, dividing the East from the West.
Nikita Khrushchev rode a reformist wave within the party to win the power struggle after Stalin’s death, and he delivered the now famous secret speech to the assembled Communist Party leadership, in which he decried Stalin’s program of personality cult and rule by totalitarian fear. Khrushchev revealed the existence of Lenin’s letter that criticized Stalin, and this began a program of de-Stalinization of the party. The Gulag forced-labor camps were greatly reduced in size, and eventually disbanded in 1960. Monuments and artwork celebrating the personality cult of Stalin were systematically removed, and places bearing his name were renamed. Most importantly, power within the party was decentralized from one person down to lower-level groups, and the purges were denounced.
Khrushchev also tried to deescalate the tension between the East and West in the Cold War through a program of “peaceful coexistence.” This ideal was challenged by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, after which Russia was forced to remove its facilities in Cuba, and Khrushchev appeared diplomatically weak to many Communist Party leaders during the crisis. He was soon replaced by the communist hard-liner Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), who articulated and exercised the Brezhnev Doctrine of Soviet military intervention in any country where communist rule was threatened.
None of the economic programs of Khrushchev or Brezhnev addressed underlying economic problems of the structure of the Soviet economy. After Stalin, the Soviet economy was essentially a “neither-nor” economy—it possessed neither the economic incentives of profit and competition that make a market economy work, nor the ideological fire, fear of punishment, and slave labor that drove production during Stalin’s time. While the Soviet state was able to send satellites into orbit, and build a military and nuclear arsenal to rival the United States as the dominant power of the day, basic consumer goods such as bread and toothpaste were consistently absent on barren store shelves. Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary from 1985 to 1991, promised reforms to save the communist economy from certain disaster through a three-pronged program.
In August 1991, conservative Communist Party hard-liners opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms staged a coup d’état to remove him from office while he was out of town. When tanks surrounded the White House (where Russia’s Supreme Soviet assembly would meet), protesters took to oppose the coup. Boris Yeltsin famously delivered a speech on top of one of the tanks immobilized by the crowds, in which he pressed the military not to support this anti-constitutional action, and he called for a general strike by the people until the coup ended.
Once the coup ended, Gorbachev remained officially in power over the Soviet Union; however, the visible instability within the Communist Party prompted many Soviet Republics who wanted independence to take action. By December, eleven of the fifteen Soviet Republics had left the Soviet Union without resistance from the Red Army (which historically had been used to reassert control under the Brezhnev Doctrine). Without a “union” to lead anymore, and with Boris Yeltsin increasingly controlling political affairs in Russia, Gorbachev and Soviet leaders were forced to concede that there was essentially no Soviet Union left, and announced the formal dissolution of the USSR on December 26, 1991. Boris Yeltsin would now act as the chief executive as president of the newly independent Russian Federation.
Yeltsin attempted to act quickly to build Russia into a westernized modern constitutional democracy. Politically, he worked with allies in the Duma to draft the Russian Constitution of 1993, which created a three-branch government, featuring a directly elected and powerful president as chief executive, a bicameral legislature with a directly elected lower house called the Duma, and a Constitutional Court empowered with judicial review and constitutional interpretation. In order to enhance the legitimacy of the new constitution, it was submitted to the people of Russia in a referendum for ratification, and it was adopted with the support of 54.5 percent of the voters.
Russia’s system of asymmetric federalism means that some regional governments have more local autonomy over policymaking power than others.
Russia’s constitution created a federal system of government, in which power was divided between the three branches of the central Russian government, and eighty-three lower-level administrative governing districts. These areas have varying levels of autonomy, meaning some have more local authority and independence than others. This is called asymmetric federalism, as opposed to the typical symmetrical federal system, in which all lower-level regional governments are given consistent, similar, constitutionally defined powers generally equal to one another.
Economically, Yeltsin worked to radically transform Russia into a market economy as rapidly as possible through the program that came to be known as shock therapy. While limited successes can be identified from shock therapy, such as the creation of an emergent class of businessmen and investors who did quite well for themselves in the privatization of Russian industry, for most Russians the legacy of shock therapy was high inflation, unemployment, the end of many guarantees of the Soviet welfare state, and a declining standard of living. There are many allegations across Russia regarding the role of corruption in shaping the emergence of Russia’s newly wealthy private classes, the wealthiest of which came to be known as oligarchs.
Oligarchs were often attached to the state industries they acquired shares in as insiders in the old communist system, and others had friends close to power. Oligarchs protected Yeltsin in his reelection bid in 1996 by providing him with a massive infusion of campaign cash and favorable media coverage in the networks they owned, and received more shares of control in state companies being privatized in the “loans for shares” scandal. Toward the end of Yeltsin’s second term, the troubled economy along with his own erratic behavior and alcoholism accelerated his exit from politics, and he surprisingly resigned in December of 1999. This allowed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to step into the presidency and stand for election as the incumbent in 2000, though many assert the same oligarchs were behind this decision as well.
Putin’s time in power has been characterized by a series of reforms that have recentralized control into Moscow from the federal system of Russia’s constitution, and that have managed and limited democracy to ensure his hold on power.
While Russia remains a democratic federal system of government officially and constitutionally, it has moved in an increasingly centralized, authoritarian, and unitary direction under Putin. Putin’s reforms and foreign policy stances are increasingly putting Russia at odds with the West again, and incidents such as the invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine (2014–2015) have led some to declare that a new Cold War is emerging. Despite all this, Russia’s economy is in much better shape today than it was at the end of the Yeltsin years (though much of this is the result of high oil and natural gas prices), and Russia appears to have stabilized politically, albeit with practices that seem different from those intended by the Constitution. Russia held a presidential election in 2018, and Vladimir Putin was reelected with 77 percent of the vote for another six-year term.
Approximately 80 percent of Russians identify as ethnically Russian, and the remaining 20 percent are made up of a diverse array of people, including Tartars, Baskirs, Chuvash, Chechens, Armenians, and many others. None of these groups make up more than 3.9 percent of the population (the Tartars are the second largest group), and most of them are well below 1 percent individually. Twenty-one of these groups are given their own autonomous “republic” in the territory they inhabit, which is the term for the regions with the most local autonomy in Russia’s asymmetrical federal system. Most of these groups are relatively well integrated into Russian society, though the Chechen people of Chechnya are a major exception. There has been a longstanding struggle for independence from Russia in Chechnya, resulting in two wars in the 1990s and terrorist attacks against Russia by Chechen separatists in 2002 (the seizure of a theater in Moscow) and 2004 (the occupation of a school in Beslan, South Ossetia).
The dominant religion in Russia has historically been Russian Orthodoxy, which was tied closely to the state since the days of early princes before the development of Russia itself. During early Communist rule, the state attempted to rid the society of religion, especially Orthodox Christianity, characterizing it as one of the tools that tsars and property owners had used to keep the masses under control to their own benefit. Stalin’s desperation for social support to fight World War II against Nazi aggression forced him to seek cooperation with the Orthodox Church, and since then, various leaders of the Communist Party either tried to combat the Church for ideological goals, or cooperate with the Church as a useful tool to the regime.
Today, as one might expect from the backstory, religion in Russia is complicated. About 40 percent of Russians identify as being Russian Orthodox Christians, 6.5 percent identify as Muslim (though this number is the fastest rising segment), and about 4 percent identify as some other type of Christian. In addition, 25 percent of Russians consider themselves agnostic or non-religious, while another 13 percent identify as atheists. That said, of those who identify as Russian Orthodox, very few actually attend religious services regularly, which may indicate that identification as Russian Orthodox may be more attached to ethnic and national pride than to real religious devotion for most Russians. One study concluded that fewer than 10 percent of Russians ever attend Orthodox services, and that somewhere between only 2 to 4 percent were integrated into Church life as a regular activity. The growing Islamic minority has become a source of recent tension in Russia, as many ethnic Russians resent the “cultural invasion” of Muslims in cities like Moscow, where there are now estimated to be at least 8,000 mosques.
Tsarist Russia strictly divided Russians into a class system based on birthright and noble status. Once the 1917 Revolution changed the regime, it abolished the old class structure with a Marxist ideal of a classless society. This ideal did not play out in reality, as a new class structure emerged with Communist Party officials on top, urban managers and workers in the middle, and rural peasants on the bottom. The Communist Party class structure was at least blind to social background, and did give many who used to be on the bottom opportunities to move up the social ladder. The basis of the new Russian class structure seems to be the market and entrepreneurship, as some individuals find great success in business and earn a fortune for themselves, living a lifestyle the rich of any developed country might envy. Other Russians who have been left behind by the new economy feel betrayed by reforms that have ended the old Communist policies of guaranteed employment and old-age pensions, and often hold deep resentment of Russia’s rich who “stole” the crown jewels of the old state-owned industries in the chaos of the 1990s. Periodically—often near an election—one of Russia’s billionaires will come under scrutiny and investigation for illicit business dealings, get put on televised public trial, and then get sent to a Siberian prison to the delight of Russian voters.
About 74 percent of Russians live in urban environments, compared to 26 percent in rural environments. Russia did not move toward a modern urbanized society until Joseph Stalin’s Five-Year Plans of industrialization, which forced many Russians to leave the countryside or face punishment. Russians in the city enjoy a marginally higher standard of living, are often better educated than their rural counterparts, and are more likely to support Western ideals that might challenge the current president’s management of democracy.
Russian civil society took a corporatist form under Communist rule. The state systematically chose which groups to privilege with access to influence state policymaking, and banned the formation of independent trade unions, political clubs, or other independent civil society organizations. State-sanctioned groups, such as the Young Pioneers, would receive state support and funding to indoctrinate young men into the ideology of the regime through activities similar to the Boy Scouts. Today, Russian civil society is poorly developed. Most Russians never attend a church service, and only about 1 percent claim to belong to a political party as anything more than a voter. Very few Russians join clubs of any kind, whether they are for political causes, charity, or even recreation. While civil society has grown since the glasnost reforms of the 1980s, it is still hampered by state policies that monitor and harass groups that are critical of the state. One exception is youth movements, such as Nashi, which tried to build patriotic nationalism among young Russians to support Putin against Russia’s foreign enemies and domestic critics. Nashi hosted youth camps to provide ideological seminars intended to enhance the power of the Russian state, even encouraging its members to marry early and have lots of children to stem Russia’s declining population crisis. Its members staged rallies supporting Putin’s reelection campaigns, and rallied against “corruption” of opposition figures, while receiving funding from the state and business interests friendly to the state. Although Nashi is now defunct, corporatist themes are still deeply rooted in Russian civil society.
Russia’s system of managed elections, among similar systems in other states, led to the creation of a new term in Comparative Politics: illiberal democracy (or possibly transitional democracy). Like liberal democracies, illiberal regimes hold elections, and the votes are counted accurately, with the winning candidates duly taking office and exercising political power. What makes them illiberal is everything leading up to election day. Significant restrictions exist on whether candidates are able to freely compete for office or not. Restrictions in the media prevent opposition candidates from being able to communicate their message and persuade voters to take a chance on them. Illiberal democracies are not really democracies, in the end, since those in power are essentially able to use the state to protect their place in power, meaning the fundamental feature of democracy, the power of voters to hold a government accountable and remove it by ballot, doesn’t really seem to exist. Despite this authoritarian structure, Russia’s Constitution allows for three types of elections at the national level.
Russia’s constitution allows voters to choose officials through national elections; however, there are many significant limitations on the ability of potential candidates to participate and compete for election victory against the incumbent government.
Russians directly elect the chief executive to a six-year term (formerly a four-year term) in a two-ballot majority system. If no candidate wins a majority (more than 50 percent) of the vote in the first round, a second round runoff takes place between the top two candidates. There has not been a runoff needed since 1996. Elections in Russia in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2018 were heavily criticized by international observers and domestic dissidents as lacking most of the basic competitiveness and civil liberties protection necessary to guarantee the will of the people was truly reflected.
| Year | Winning Candidate | % of Vote Received |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Boris Yeltsin (incumbent) | 35.8% (1st round), 54.4% (2nd round) |
| 2000 | Vladimir Putin (incumbent) | 53.4% |
| 2004 | Vladimir Putin (incumbent) | 71.9% |
| 2008 | Dmitri Medvedev | 71.2% |
| 2012 | Vladimir Putin | 63.6% |
| 2018 | Vladimir Putin (incumbent) | 76.7% |
The State Duma has 450 members. The Constitution originally provided that elections would occur every four years, the year before the presidential election. It also provided that half the seats would be awarded to the winning candidates of SMD constituencies, and half would be awarded to candidates on a party list based on the results of a nationwide PR vote, provided that the party received at least 5 percent of the vote. Reforms in 2005 changed the system to a fully PR system, with a 7 percent threshold to win representation. The reforms had a substantial effect on the composition of the State Duma after the 2007 elections.
Russia’s legislative election system has changed from a SMD-PR mix to a fully PR system and now back to a SMD-PR mix, largely because each of these reforms would benefit the president’s party at the time of the change.
| Year | Seats held by United Russia | Seats held by Opposition Parties |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 223 | 227 |
| 2007 | 315 | 135 |
| 2011 | 238 | 212 |
| 2016 | 343 | 107 |
By 2011, the recession and the decline in oil prices led many voters to turn away from the United Russia Party, though the party still held a majority of the Duma. It appeared increasingly likely that the next elections might not produce a United Russia majority, and Putin requested yet another reform to the election system, returning to the SMD and PR mix of the past, perhaps in order to placate protests after the elections of 2011, but also likely believing that United Russia candidates who might not win over 50 percent of a party list vote may still at least come up with pluralities in most SMD constituencies.
The election system reform had its intended effect. Coupled with an aggressively nationalistic campaign strategy, significant restrictions on opposition parties to allow them to qualify for the ballot and campaign, and low voter turnout, the United Russia Party easily won a supermajority of 343 seats in the 2016 Duma elections.
Russia is a federal system made up of a central national government and eighty-five “federal subjects” governing on a regional level. Each federal subject held elections for governor and regional legislature under the Constitution of 1993. After Chechen terrorists seized a school hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia (a Russian federal subject), in 2004, Putin signed a law that gave the president the power to dismiss regional governors and later signed another law canceling elections for governor altogether and giving the president the power to appoint each regional governor with the consent of the regional legislature. This consolidation of power in the executive significantly reduced the federal nature of Russia and made regional governments largely an extension of the national executive. This power to appoint governors lasted until 2012. When Putin announced he was running for president leading into the 2012 election, it sparked a wave of protests across Russia demanding free and fair elections. Little has been reformed to make elections much freer or fairer than they have been since 2000, but President Medvedev did sign a law that restored regional elections for governor in 2012. Under the new law, there are steep requirements for gathering enough signatures for candidates to qualify for the ballot, and it is extremely difficult for any candidate to do so without state support. This system is referred to as the municipal filter by opposition figures as it prevents real opposition from contending for office. The president retains the power to dismiss governors and appoint acting governors as short-term replacements until the next election. An appointed acting governor automatically qualifies for the ballot. In 2017, Putin dismissed and replaced eleven governors three weeks before regional elections. All of Putin’s appointees easily won election afterward. Russia’s federal system has been increasingly centralized under national and presidential control since Putin’s rise to power.
On certain occasions, Russian voters are called upon to approve or reject a particular policy by vote. These instances are rare, but they include the ratification of the 1993 Constitution; a constitutional referendum in Chechnya in 2007, which made a number of technical changes in the Chechen republic and declared Chechnya would remain an “inseparable part of Russia”; and the referendum in Crimea to join Russia after Russian military intervention in 2014. International observers regarded the Crimean referendum as deeply flawed given that it took place while Crimea was still occupied by Russian soldiers, and the reported figures of over 96 percent in favor of joining Russia with 83 percent voter turnout came under intense scrutiny by data analysts and reporters on the ground.
Russia’s political party structure is far more fluid than that of Britain. Even Russia’s dominant party, United Russia, has only stood for election since 2003, and the most stable “opposition parties” are not realistically going to challenge for power. Most of Russia’s liberal democratic forces have a difficult time organizing and communicating their message against Putin and the forces of the state, and these parties regularly disband and reorganize.
United Russia was formed in 2001 as a union of the Unity and Fatherland parties, promising to avoid the “communism vs. capitalism” dichotomy plaguing Russian politics at the time, and to bring stability to the Russian political system. Practically, the party was formed for the purpose of supporting President Putin in the legislature. The party appears to support all manner of candidates regardless of their ideological beliefs, provided that they support the presidential administration. In this regard, Russia can be characterized as a clear example of a dominant-party system, meaning United Russia acts as a party of power, existing not to implement a particular ideological agenda, but rather to secure and maintain power for its members. Parties of power are typically based on a large patron-client network, and will frequently demonstrate evidence of corruption in public administration. These are both certainly the case for United Russia. One poll in 2013 found that 51 percent of Russians agreed with the characterization that “United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves,” a term originally coined by Russian political activist Alexei Navalny. Interestingly, Navalny has been arrested numerous times for a variety of suspected white-collar crimes, usually within days of leading rallies against Putin and United Russia, and he has served time in prison and under house arrest.
The CPRF was founded immediately after Boris Yeltsin banned the existence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the previous ruling party of the USSR. In the first legislative elections in 1995, it won the most seats in the Duma and emerged as Yeltsin’s primary opposition. Since the rise of Putin, the party has declined in support among the Russian public, with most of its voters consisting of elderly Russian “conservatives” who yearn for the “good old days” of Soviet Communism. The party is factionalized into those who support traditional Marxist-Leninist worker-centered values, and those who see the market-based reforms under Deng Xiaoping in China as the model for development. The party has not had much trouble with placing candidates on the ballot for election or engaging in other opposition political activities, but this may simply be because the party stands little chance of actually challenging Putin for power. Its candidate has come in second place in every presidential election since 1996, but with vote totals nowhere near the United Russia candidates, receiving just over 17 percent in both 2008 and 2012 for its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, and only 12 percent in 2018 for its candidate, Pavel Grudinin.
Despite its name, the Liberal Democratic Party is neither liberal nor democratic in its ideology. The best description for the party is fiercely nationalist and far right, following the radical ideology of its controversial leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. It aspires to create a new Russian Empire through the unification of many former Soviet republics. Similar to the CPRF, it has little trouble qualifying candidates for the ballot or expressing opposition viewpoints, and it does relatively poorly in elections, with Zhirinovsky never passing 10 percent of the vote in his six campaigns for the presidency.
Russia’s liberal opposition parties (the actual liberals, unlike the LDPR) are poorly organized and disunified, partially because of the lack of a charismatic political figure who can bring the opposition together, but also because of the harassment and intimidation that frequently comes from challenging the current administration. Since 2000, an array of parties demanding fair elections and an end to political corruption have contended for office, including Yabloko, The Union of Right Forces, Democratic Choice of Russia, and Solidarnost, to name a few of the more noteworthy and successful. Candidates from these parties have often found immense difficulty qualifying for the ballot, getting media interviews, and organizing rallies. For example, when Garry Kasparov, one of Russia’s most famous chess champions, attempted to run for president in 2008, the only media outlet that would ever grant him an interview was Echo Russia, a radio station with a reputation among the opposition as the only independent media voice. When he organized a march in Moscow, police were positioned all around the perimeter of the march area. When the march began, one of the participants produced a Bolshevik flag, a symbol banned after the collapse of the USSR. Police immediately descended upon the marchers and arrested many of the participants, including Kasparov, who maintains that the person who produced the flag was likely planted by the police. Kasparov did not qualify for the ballot in 2008 since he could not meet the requirement to hold a rally of at least 500 attendees to announce a candidacy and have them sign a petition. The venue scheduled to host Kasparov’s announcement cancelled his contract two days before the event.
Liberal parties that have the potential to win elections and challenge Putin for power frequently have a difficult experience in communicating their message and getting their candidates on the ballot.
Nearly every Russian liberal opposition figure has similar stories about intimidation and obstruction in their attempts to contend for the presidency or seats in the Duma.
State corporatism under the Soviet Union has dampened the development of Russian civil society, and Russia’s interest group system serves as further evidence. While there is said to be over 300,000 registered non-governmental interest groups in Russia, groups likely to express opposition views, such as those aimed at protecting human rights, are frequently barred from official registration. A 2006 law gave the Federal Public Chamber the authority to review the registration of foreign NGOs and determine that they could not operate in Russia if it was in the national interest to ban them. The reporting requirements were incredibly difficult and costly for NGOs to comply with, and the rules were highly unclear, leaving Public Chamber officials a great deal of leeway in interpreting whether an NGO met the regulatory requirements to register or not. Business, trade, and labor groups are typically allowed to form and act politically, but the most influential groups are usually those with insider ties to the state, as opposed to those representing the interests of the largest shares of the public. Many of the most influential business interests are companies in which siloviki occupy executive positions or serve on the board of directors. Siloviki is a Russian term for people who worked in the security services such as the KGB (Russia’s Soviet spy service) or its modern day successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), agencies that Vladimir Putin worked for during his early career.
Russia’s system is highly corporatist, managing the formation and activity of interest groups and civil society from the state level through institutions like the Federal Public Chamber.
The super-wealthy oligarchs of Russia emerged in the chaos of shock therapy privatization of the early 1990s, using insider ties, corruption, and other illicit business practices to gain control of the most valuable formerly state-owned industries of the former Soviet Union. When the oligarchs backed Yeltsin in 1996 and propped Putin up in 2000, many believed it was the oligarchs who would continue to pull the strings of the Russian state going forward. Putin changed this arrangement, making it clear to the oligarchs privately that they could keep their wealth as long as they remained out of Russian politics. Oligarchs who defied this ultimatum have suffered severe consequences.
Boris Berezovsky was a media tycoon who owned Russia’s most watched TV networks, and used his networks to help Yeltsin in the 1990s. He became a critic of Putin after the 2000 election, and was subsequently investigated for fraud and embezzlement, fleeing to Britain for political asylum. The government took over his TV network, and members of Putin’s inner circle now sit on its board of directors. Mikhail Khordorkovsky was once Russia’s richest man, worth over $15 billion, but used his money to fund opposition parties in the 2003 Duma elections and criticized the “managed elections” and corruption under Putin. Khordorkovsky was arrested and convicted for fraud and tax evasion, and was sentenced to a nine-year prison term beginning in 2003. Near the end of the sentence, new charges for other crimes were brought against him, and his sentence was extended. Putin pardoned Khordorkovsky in 2013, and he now lives in exile in Switzerland. The assets of Khordorkovsky’s oil company Yukos, which was bankrupted after the government’s charges, were transferred to Rosneft in a suspicious auction. Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister of Putin’s, is Rosneft’s chairman of the board.
Despite the seeming political motivation of these and other prosecutions of oligarchs, Russians often respond positively to the arrests, as oligarchs and mafiosos who made their wealth in the turmoil of the 1990s are disdained by Russians, who have long valued equality of result as a crucial piece of their political culture. There’s even a saying in Russia that “in an election year, Putin needs to spear an oligarch.”
Under the Soviet system, the only media allowed to exist in the country were the Communist Party’s propaganda tools, such as Pravda, the state print medium. After the dissolution of the USSR, a private media market emerged. Russia’s media remains predominantly privately owned, but it may be characterized as effectively state-controlled.
Although most Russian media is privately owned, there are many rules and incentives in place that motivate the media to cover the government favorably.
The government of Russia does not explicitly censor and control what appears on broadcasts or what gets printed, but it exerts tremendous influence over it in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. Major media oligarchs, such as Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, faced arrest and exile once they became critical of Putin. Other media tycoons quickly learn that control of their wealth and networks hinges upon compliance with the administration. Journalists who publish critical stories about the government are often killed under violent and mysterious circumstances. One noteworthy example is Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of government policy in Chechnya, who was poisoned. In another, five employees of a critical newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, have died suspiciously since 2000.
Companies with deep ties to the state, such as Gazprom, the largest natural gas company in the world, often buy large stakes of media companies. Gazprom is chaired by Viktor Zubkov, a former prime minister of Russia under Vladimir Putin, and was previously chaired by Dmitri Medvedev, the current prime minister. When Gazprom acquired the Russian News Service, its managers called a meeting with the employees of the company in which they demanded that at least 50 percent of all news broadcasts must be “positive” news. When editors asked what would be considered a “positive” news story, they were told “when in doubt, ask the leadership.”
The president of Russia is directly elected by voters in a two-ballot majority system. He serves a six-year term (formerly a four-year term before a change in 2008), and is limited to two consecutive terms. A president who serves two terms may run again after standing down for a term, as Vladimir Putin did in 2012 after stepping down from the presidency in 2008. The president acts as the Constitutional head of state, separated from the role of head of government filled by the prime minister. The president is not only a ceremonial head of state as the monarch is in Britain, though. The president of Russia holds the most wide-reaching powers under the constitution, though sometimes it appears Russian politics is more about who is in a particular position of authority, rather than the defined powers of the position (such as when Putin acted as prime minister from 2008 to 2012).
The president exerts tremendous power over the Russian state, both formally and informally.
The formal powers of the president include:
The prime minister is appointed by the president with the approval of the Duma. The president may dismiss a prime minister at any time, as Yeltsin did frequently during his presidency. There is no vice president, so the prime minister becomes the president in the event of a presidential vacancy, such as when Putin became president upon Yeltsin’s resignation in 2000. He acts as the head of government according to the Russian Constitution, but exercises very little formal power. The Constitution provides that he chairs meetings of Russia’s most senior officials, including the cabinet, but his identified powers are primarily advisory rather than exercising functional enforcement. That being said, when Vladimir Putin was the prime minister from 2008 to 2012, there was very little doubt among Russian political observers that it was still he, and not President Medvedev, who was in control of the state.
Russia’s Federal Assembly is a bicameral legislature with a lower house (the Duma) and an upper house (the Federation Council), and each possesses distinct character traits and functions.
The Duma is composed of 450 deputies who are chosen through a half single-member-district, and half proportional representation election, after reforms in 2015. They are given power by the Russian Constitution to pass bills into law with the president’s signature, approve the budget, and confirm or reject the appointment of the prime minister. Their real power, however, is substantially limited due to the president’s wide-reaching power to govern by decree through the cabinet, which the Duma may not remove. It is also empowered to impeach the president with a two-thirds vote in both the Duma and the Federation Council, in addition to a guilty conviction of treason in Russia’s Supreme Court. The Duma attempted to use these powers against Yeltsin on numerous occasions from 1995 to 1999, but could never reach the two-thirds threshold.
Each of Russia’s eighty-five regional administrative units sends two members to the Federation Council for a total of 170 members. One member is chosen by the regional governor, and the other by the regional legislature. Governors would frequently appoint themselves to sit on the Federation Council concurrently, but Vladimir Putin ended this practice in 2000 upon assuming the presidency. With the change in 2004 allowing the president to nominate regional governors himself, the president has quite a bit of control over the composition of the Federation Council, and this control expanded with a change ratified in 2014 that added seventeen new seats to the Federation Council, each of which is appointed by the president. Unlike their colleagues in the Duma, members of the Federation Council must disavow membership in any political party upon taking their seat.
The Federation Council functions as the other lawmaking body that passes bills along with the Duma, but the Duma may override the Federation Council and pass a bill without its approval with a two-thirds vote. In addition to this basic function, the Federation Council also possesses the power to approve changes to the borders among Russia’s regional units, approve the president’s decision to use armed forces outside of Russia (as they did in Crimea in 2014), approve the president’s nomination of judges to Russia’s highest courts, and impeach the president in cooperation with the Duma and the Constitutional Court.
Russia is a massive country with extensive geographic, ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity across its territory. The 1993 Constitution established Russia as a federal system in order to allow regional autonomy for local governments, which could best address the diverse needs and policy preferences of their local populations. But not all of Russia’s eighty-five federal subjects are equal in levels of local autonomy. This system, established in the constitution, is called asymmetric federalism. The various federal subjects of Russia fall mostly into one of two categories. Oblasts are the ordinary regional governments, made up predominantly of ethnic Russians, with the ability to elect their own regional legislature and governor. Republics are more autonomous areas, with their own regional constitutions; a republic is usually the regional homeland of an ethnic minority group.
The noteworthy republics of Russia include Dagestan and Chechnya, both being southwestern hotbeds of Islamic insurgency and separatist movements. Russia has fought two wars against Chechnyan separatists since 1991, and the central government of Russia exerts extensive control over the activities of each regional government.
Under the Soviet system, courts functioned as another political arm of the Communist Party and exercised no judicial independence or commitment to the rule of law. The Russian Constitution of 1993 attempted to establish an independent judiciary, but this goal is currently eluding Russia. To wit, none of the cases of political prosecutions brought against oppositional oligarchs were ever challenged by the Russian judiciary. No member of the Russian security services, such as the FSB, has ever been prosecuted for violating citizens’ rights. It is generally assumed in Russia that judges may be bought off with bribes or favors to achieve favorable rulings from the court.
There are nineteen members of the Constitutional Court, appointed by the president with the confirmation of the Federation Council. The Constitutional Court is given the chief power of constitutional interpretation by the Constitution, and may exercise judicial review against any laws or presidential decrees that it finds unconstitutional. This power is not ever borne out in practice, though. Rumors of a possible conflict with the Court in 2007 prompted Putin to order its relocation from Moscow to St. Petersburg, a move that many of the Court’s judges said would cause “logistical nightmares.”
Separate from the Constitutional Court is the Russian Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort, or the last place a legal dispute may be settled as the final decision after taking appeals from lower-level courts. It has 115 judges who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Federation Council. They do not have the power to review law for constitutionality, though, which is the exclusive province of the Constitutional Court. The Supreme Court was also ordered to relocate from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 2012.
The military served as a crucial source of power and legitimacy for the regime of the Soviet Union, and was regularly used to enforce Soviet control over troubled areas. The military was a top priority of the regime, receiving the bulk of the government’s finances to the detriment of nearly all other functions of the state. Despite this, the military never exerted much political influence and remained firmly under the control of the Communist Party until the instability of the late 1980s and 1990s, exemplified by the attempted coup carried out by many military officials against Gorbachev in 1991. A presidential decree after the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the Russian Federation control over all forces within Russia, and made the Russian president the commander in chief. The military seems to still be firmly under the control of the civilian political leadership, as senior officials in Russia are nearly all from civilian backgrounds.
Putin has increasingly used Russia’s military to project Russia’s strength abroad in a manner not seen since the Soviet era. Russia has the fifth largest active-duty force in the world, and spent $69.3 billion on the military in 2013, third behind only the United States and China. Russia has engaged in many recent military campaigns in its region. When ethnic Russians in South Ossetia seceded from Georgia, Georgian forces moved into the territory to restore order. Russia responded with a full-scale invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under the guise of “peace-enforcement,” recognized the independence of the region, and the territories remain under Russian military occupation to the present day. After a pro-Russian president was toppled by domestic protests in Ukraine, Russia sent soldiers into Crimea and eastern Ukraine without national identifiers (such as a Russian flag), and took over government buildings, calling for secession. Russia sent in the formal military shortly thereafter claiming the responsibility to “protect” ethnic Russians in the region who might be victimized by Ukrainian nationalist extremism. The Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Russia after a 2014 referendum that was held under military occupation.
The turmoil in the late years of communism and early years of the new regime gave Russians a very different set of policy concerns than those of developed liberal democracies. Recent political stability and economic growth have not benefited all Russians, and the struggle between those who want democratic reform and those grateful for the end of the turmoil, despite the authoritarianism, continues today.
Russia’s experience with shock therapy remains deeply scarred into the minds of most Russians, as poverty soared to rates ten times above their pre-Soviet-collapse levels, and inflation and unemployment affected Russians more than the Great Depression had. Whether shock therapy policies, the lack of full implementation of shock therapy, government corruption, or general instability during the state’s collapse was most responsible is still debated today. The Russian economy recovered mightily under Vladimir Putin through 2008, thanks mostly to rising energy prices. The recession of 2008 brought this growth to a halt, and the government has faced serious budget problems since. While inequality exists in Russia, its Gini coefficient indicates that there is less inequality in Russia than in most of our countries of study, and Russia has no extreme poverty (a standard of living of less than two dollars per day, or some similar measure). Much of Russia’s economy is still state-owned, and reliant on the energy sector and other natural resources. Diversification of Russia’s economy has been a stated goal of Putin and Medvedev.
Russia remains the dominant power controlling affairs with its eastern European neighbors even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s hegemony is exemplified by the case of Georgia mentioned previously, and that of Ukraine. Ukraine suffers through extremely cold winters and is dependent on Russian natural gas to heat homes. The Ukrainian government heavily subsidizes its citizens’ use of natural gas for this purpose. Russia has often used natural gas as a tool of control in diplomacy with Ukraine, cutting off access at crucial moments of Ukrainian negotiations over trade or other matters with Western Europe. Ukrainian politics internally has been divided between pro-Russian and anti-Russian parties in recent decades, with Putin personally backing pro-Russian candidates with money, advisors, and even campaign appearances by Putin himself. When protests in Ukraine forced pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich to resign, Russia granted asylum to Yanukovich and invaded eastern Ukraine, starting the crisis leading to the annexation of Crimea.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USSR was regarded as the opposing polar superpower against the United States. Russia has lost its superpower status, and has had to cope with a world in which the United States is now a clear hegemon. While Yeltsin’s presidency seemed to signal an end to the old Cold War tensions, relations between the United States and Russia have severely deteriorated under Vladimir Putin.
As former Soviet satellites and republics seek membership in NATO or the European Union, they often meet stiff resistance from Russia, using natural gas exports as one of many tools of control. Both Georgia and Ukraine were in early stages of paths to NATO membership when the Russian military intervened.
Although Russia pursued integration into the new globalized economy in the early 2000s, seeking membership in the G-7 (which was expanded to the G-8 with their addition), and gaining ascension into the World Trade Organization in 2012, Russia’s annexation of Crimea ended any chance of further integration in the near future. The G-8 was reduced back to the G-7 shortly after, and economic sanctions were imposed on Russia by all of the economic powers of the West.
Russia is facing a crisis of declining population that threatens to reduce its power and prospects for economic growth. The crisis is the result of declines in birth rates, along with poor health habits of Russia’s men, most notably alcoholism. Life expectancy for the average Russian man is only 65, compared to 77 for Russian women. Nearly a quarter of Russian men die before the age of 55, and most of these deaths are alcohol related. Meanwhile, only 1.75 children are born to each Russian woman (when two would be necessary for simply replacing the current population). Russia has tried to counteract this trend (with limited success) by encouraging ethnic Russians living abroad to return to the homeland, and by stirring the patriotic nationalism of its people by asserting it as a civic duty to bear a large family to preserve the nation. In 2007, one Russian region even gave its residents a holiday off of work, encouraging people to use the day to conceive children with their spouse, offering prizes to any couple who took up the challenge to “Give birth to a patriot.”
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
Compared to British political culture, the political culture of Russia is more likely to
The collapse of the Soviet Union was preceded by
Asymmetric federalism in Russia refers to
One recent reform to the Russian presidency was
In which region of Russia has ethnic tension most frequently been expressed through political violence?
Civil society in Russia
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Political and economic power in Russia is increasingly held by
Unlike the prime minister of Great Britain, the Russian president may
Which of the following accurately describes the Russian population?