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Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective

Essays in Honour of Archie Brown

Alex Pravda author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:26th May '05

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Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective cover

Leaders and leadership continue to dominate Russia's political development. Like his predecessors in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has made a crucial impact on the substance and style of Russian politics. His efforts to use traditional tools of state power to manage democracy and market capitalism have had mixed effects on both. Leading Russia investigates the ambiguities and contradictions of Putin's rule from four perspectives. The volume first considers his leadership in the context of Russia's convulsive historical cycle of revolutionary transformation, breakdown, consolidation, and stagnation. The study then analyses how normative and institutional components of democracy have fared under Putin's regime of stronger executive control. It proceeds to examine the strengths and weaknesses of presidential power vis-à-vis bureaucratic, regional, and corporate groups. The volume concludes with two assessments of the strategic direction in which Putin is taking Russia. They explore the tensions between bureaucratic-authoritarian trends and Putin's apparent commitment to electoral democracy, market capitalism, and alignment with the West. The book helps to deepen our understanding of the cultural and institutional factors shaping Putin's leadership approach and policy priorities. More widely, it sheds light on the complexity of the relationship between post-communist leadership, democracy, and economic modernization.

This is a significant book and a nice tribute to Oxford's Archie Brown, long a distinguished student of Soviet leadership. * Foreign Affairs *
...this book's value lies in its ability to accurately describe the complexities and contradictions of the Putin era to date. * Europe-Asia Studies *

ISBN: 9780199276141

Dimensions: 242mm x 162mm x 23mm

Weight: 608g

320 pages