Managing Contention in Post-Soviet Russia

Extract

Contrary to popular belief, the Russians are not a passive people. Russian workers, for example, can be quite as contentious as their more famously fractious counterparts in Poland and France. As Graeme Robertson demonstrates in this excellent new book, however, the contours of protest in Russia, including its tactics, timing, targets, and objectives, differ significantly from the contentious politics in these other, more liberal societies, largely as a result of the dominating presence of the state.

Engaging a growing literature in comparative politics on hybrid regimes, Robertson argues that the presence of both liberal and authoritarian elements in post-Soviet Russian politics has given rise to an equally hybrid profile of contentious politics. This is an important point. Most of the existing literature on this sort of regime—also called “illiberal democracies,”“managed democracies,” or “electoral authoritarianism” (Diamond 2002; Levitsky and Way 2010)—focuses on electoral politics: the reasons such regimes allow some measure of electoral competition in the first place, the strategies they use to ensure persuasive victories, and the risks they run that they might lose. By extending this literature to examine how such regimes manage and shape contentious politics within their society (not always in ways they foresee), Robertson offers a more comprehensive understanding of how such regimes negotiate the delicate and often volatile balance between social agency and government control.