Images of Russia in Western scholarship

ABSTRACT

Initially Western scholars generally assumed that Russia would become a ‘normal’ democratic state, taking its place in the existing world order. They attributed this to Yeltsin's democratic credentials, but they could do so only by ignoring the clear flaws in Russian democracy as it developed under his presidency. This means that when Russia moved in a more authoritarian direction under Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin, the explanation that most gave for this was the agency of Putin. He was seen as reinstating many of the elements of the Soviet legacy, including the role of the security apparatus. Putin’s rise was also seen as decisive in the shift of Russia’s international position from one seeking accommodation within the existing international architecture to one seeking to revise that architecture in ways objectionable to the West. The result is said to be a new cold war. But there is disagreement about how this should be understood: is Russia acting as a traditional great power, and therefore understandable through the established principles of international relations, or is she still claiming Soviet-style exceptionalism? What is clear, and many do not appreciate, is that even when Putin has gone, Russia’s core interests will likely not change.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• democracy
• Putin
• Soviet legacy
• new cold war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, see the titles of Ellison 2006; Hahn 1996; Hanson 2010; McFaul, Petrov, and Ryabov 2004; Murrell 1997; and Petro 1995.

2 For example, McFaul 2010; on waves see Huntington 1991.

3 On the role of NGOs in building democracy, see Henderson 2003.

4 For example, Lowenhardt 1995 and Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer 1998. For a contrasting political culture argument emphasising ‘the deep democratic aspirations of the Russian people’ that does not see culture as an obstacle, see Petro 1995.

5 For an interesting characterisation of his modus operandi, see Breslauer 1999.

6 On the oligarchs, see Fortescue 2006; Hoffman 2002; Klebnikov 2000; Midgley and Hutchens 2004, and Sakwa 2014. On economic reform, Aslund 2002; Gustafson 1999; and Tikhomirov 2000.

7 On corruption, see Holmes 2006.

8 For example, Gel’man 2015; Gel’man and Ross 2010; Gill 2015; Ostrow, Satarov, and Khakamada 2007; and Treisman 2010. For a study that accepted the system’s basic democratic credentials for much longer than most, see Sakwa 2011. Richard Sakwa has been one of the most acute observers of Russian affairs for some time and his views can be traced through his various publications: Sakwa 1993, 1996, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2020.

9 See Arutunyan 2014, Gessen 2012, Hill & Gaddy 2013, Roxburgh 2012, Shevtsova 2005, Stuermer 2008, Wegren 2019. For different approaches that still emphasise the centrality of Putin, see Laqueur 2015, Miller 2018, and Taylor 2018.

10 For a study questioning the thrust of much of this analysis, see Renz 2006.

11 For a sophisticated analysis of the circumstances surrounding the Medvedev succession to the presidency that emphasises factional conflict, see Sakwa 2011.

12 For some early studies of the Yeltsin era foreign policy, see Donaldson & Nogee 1998 and Shearman 1995.

13 This line of argument has been most clear in those studies of ‘eurasianism’ within Russia, and in the division of Russian officials into ‘Eurasianists’ and ‘Atlanticists’. In retrospect, this latter distinction has been less useful than it at first appeared. For studies of Eurasianism, see Ingram 2001, Laruelle 2004, and Rangsimaporn 2006.

14 The question of nostalgia has been a significant line of enquiry in Russian politics, but rarely has it been applied systematically with regard to foreign affairs. On nostalgia see Boym 2001 and Oushakine 2009.

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Notes on contributors

Graeme Gill

Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney. He is a long-time student of Soviet and Russian politics, with 25 books to his name. The most recent, Bridling Dictators. Rules and Authoritarian Politics, is published by Oxford University Press in November 2021. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a former member of the International Council for Central and East European Studies.