The Kremlin’s ability to maintain power and popularity despite an aging leader, an ailing economy, a rallying opposition, and many other domestic and international challenges is puzzling given current theories of authoritarianism. These theories focus on some combination of material interests, institutional engineering, and the charisma and skill of the dictator himself. A close examination of the Russian case, however, reveals that the real power of Putin’s dictatorship lies in the realm of ideas and emotions that chime with powerful currents in society, which in turn shape and limit the Kremlin’s strategies.
About the Authors
Graeme B. Robertson
Graeme Robertson, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia (2011).
Samuel Greeneis director of King’s Russia Institute at King’s College London and author of Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (2014).
Read the full essay here. In contrast to authoritarian power structures, which rest on a form of bureaucratic corporatism that makes the leader its hostage, the regime in Moscow rests…
Read the full essay here. The Russian system of personalized power is growing ever more dependent on the same strategies that proved useless in sustaining the USSR. While the system…
