Building an Authoritarian Polity
Russia in Post-Soviet Times

Argues that post-Soviet Russia was never on a democratic trajectory because dominant elites always fostered the building of an authoritarian polity.

Graeme Gill (Author)

9781107130081, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 November 2015

238 pages, 13 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

'Graeme Gill has written a concise, readable, yet remarkably detailed account of the construction of contemporary Russia's particular brand of authoritarianism, the linchpin of which is its charismatic and powerful president. Gill explains contemporary Russia not as the result of failed democratization, but as the result of elite-driven state-building in the absence of an ideological template with which to coordinate competing interests and centers of power in Russia's massive federal system.' Josephine T. Andrews, Slavic Review

Graeme Gill shows why post-Soviet Russia has failed to achieve the democratic outcome widely expected at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, instead emerging as an authoritarian polity. He argues that the decisions of dominant elites have been central to the construction of an authoritarian polity, and explains how this occurred in four areas of regime-building: the relationship with the populace, the manipulation of the electoral system, the internal structure of the regime itself, and the way the political elite has been stabilised. Instead of the common 'Yeltsin is a democrat, Putin an autocrat' paradigm, this book shows how Putin built upon the foundations that Yeltsin had laid. It offers a new framework for the study of an authoritarian political system, and is therefore relevant not just to Russia but to many other authoritarian polities.

1. Stability and authoritarian regimes
Part I. Structuring Public Political Activity: 2. Regime and society
3. The party system and electoral politics
Part II. Structuring the Regime: 4. Structuring institutional power
5. Elite stabilization
Conclusion: the Putin system and the potential for regime change.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]