The new book by Alexander Baturo and Jos Elkink is an amazing new work on the very relevant topic nowadays as we are witnessing Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. While many argue whether the sanctions against Russia are enough for undermining Putin’s regime from the inside, this book can serve as useful material for understanding the nature of Putin’s personalism, its development up until now and the possibilities of its expansion or decline in the future.
Based on an in-depth textual and quantitative analysis of a great number of policy documents and surveys, the authors examine the features of regime personalisation in Russia through four different pillars. First, through the impressive quantitative analysis of Putin’s patronage networks, they find that in contrast to the early stages of Putin’s power acquisition, when several patronage networks were strongly present, over time the network of the national leader becomes dominant. To me, the most impressive part of this analysis was the amount and scope of data included in the study. Such broad-scale quantitative analysis creates a very detailed picture of the structure of Putin’s closest circle and its influence on his decisions or personal power.
Then the authors move to the exploration of the reshuffles, informal and formal network alignment, as well as the relative importance of institutional components of individual influence in Russia. As they measure these institutional changes and influences through quantitative methods, they conclude that Putin’s regime is more deinstitutionalised than that of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. In my opinion, the strongest part of this analysis is that it incorporates statistical analysis of the relative importance of office versus officeholder. Such an approach, to some extent, manages to address the puzzle of deinstitutionalisation in Russia where a presence of a hegemonic party and institutionalised career paths together with prevalent patronage networks makes it hard to assess the role and strength of institutions.
After that, the authors suggest another interesting approach to the study of a leader’s permanency in office. By looking at the Putin–Medvedev tandem period between 2008 and 2012, they examined whether core members of the political elite continued to view Putin as the national leader or shifted their attention to the new president. Using text analysis, they conclude that, in the beginning, the speeches of the regional governors resembled those of both Medvedev and Putin, but after 2012, their rhetoric became closer to the ideas of Putin, who was in their view the real leader.
Finally, to measure media personalisation, authors have provided the statistical analysis of media coverage of Putin and other important political figures as well as the changing content of their speeches over time. As a result, they conclude that there is only modest evidence of media personalisation: it increased over time, but a personality cult was not yet established.
Several factors make this book a great contribution to the increasing scholarship on Russian politics and personalist regimes in general. First, this study can provide a very good understanding of the nature of Putin’s regime and the possibilities of its expansion or weakening from within. Second, it introduces novel approaches and analytical tools for studying personalism which can be applied to other similar studies on personalist regimes worldwide and conducting a comparative analysis. Finally, this book advances the old Kremlinology approaches by relying on an exceptionally wide range of sources and data rather than on an opinion of a single informed observer.
Nevertheless, several issues can be addressed for strengthening the argument of this book and making it more comprehensive. First, all of the four pillars, through which the regime personalisation is examined here, deal with it as a “top-down” process, in which the whole society is observed as a mere subject of a personal power constructed “above” through shifting power dynamics among specific patronage networks and elite circles. It would make this research more inclusive if the authors reflect on the role whole society plays in the process of regime personalisation, to what extent the availability of resources for social mobilisation affects it, in what ways the regimes attempt to control these recourses and how the political opposition fits into this whole context.
Additionally, for the study of deinstitutionalisation, this book is mainly focused on the analysis of the power of formal institutions and officeholders, but it says little about informal institutions that have a significant influence inside the personalist regimes such as Russia. Although it may be challenging methodologically, consideration of informal institutions is especially important because under their specific symbiosis, when under the veil of formal institutions, there is an informal basis, and they can even become subversive institutions that have the potential to undermine the existing regime. institutions and networks into the analysis.
Moreover, even though this study provides a very comprehensive analysis of a wide range of Russian media sources from television to radio and press, the data from social media platforms is not included in the research. Considering the increasing impact of social media, excluding these platforms from media analysis creates significant loopholes in the study. Thus the authors need to incorporate social media in their future research on the subject.
Except for the perceptions of the political elite in Russia, it would be interesting to look at how the perception of foreign political leaders with the regards to Putin has shifted. This can teel to what extent international actors have contributed to the regime personalisation in Russia.
Overall, it is an impressive work, which has a huge potential to be expanded in the future and provides a solid basis for conducting a comparative analysis of different personalist regimes worldwide. Also, the language of the book is so straightforward and engaging and the whole work is structured so well that a reader can finish it in one sitting.