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"Russia Culture"
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Natasha's dance : a cultural history of Russia
This text provides a richly evocative exploration of Russia, its culture and people. It ranges from the splendour of 18th-century St Petersburg to the power of Stalinist propaganda, bringing to life an extraordinary cast of serf artists and aristocrats, revolutionaries, priests and exiles.
Can Russia Modernise?
In this original, bottom-up account of the evolution of contemporary Russia, Alena Ledeneva seeks to reveal how informal power operates. Concentrating on Vladimir Putin's system of governance - referred to as sistema - she identifies four key types of networks: his inner circle, useful friends, core contacts and more diffuse ties and connections. These networks serve sistema but also serve themselves. Reliance on networks enables leaders to mobilise and to control, yet they also lock politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen into informal deals, mediated interests and personalised loyalty. This is the 'modernisation trap of informality': one cannot use the potential of informal networks without triggering their negative long-term consequences for institutional development. Ledeneva's perspective on informal power is based on in-depth interviews with sistema insiders and enhanced by evidence of its workings brought to light in court cases, enabling her to draw broad conclusions about the prospects for Russia's political institutions.
eBook
Russian Conservatism
\"Examines the history of Russian conservative thought from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Patriotism of Despair
The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia.
In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair.The Patriotism of Despairexamines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: \"We have no Motherland.\" Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices?
Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the \"neocoms\": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.
eBook
Plots against Russia : conspiracy and fantasy after socialism
\"A study of paranoid, conspiratorial, and extremist trends in Russia's media, film, and fiction since the collapse of the Soviet Union\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Russia's postcolonial identity : a subaltern empire in a Eurocentric world
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This book applies postcolonial theory to Russia by looking at it as a subaltern empire. It pushes postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, which produces tensions and reveals multiple blind spots in both approaches. A critical re-evaluation of the existing literature enables the author to produce a comprehensive account of how Russia's position in the international system has conditioned its domestic development, and how this in turn generated specific foreign policy outcomes. Having internalised the Eurocentric worldview, Russia is nevertheless different from the core European countries. This difference is not determined by 'culture', but rather by uneven and combined development of global capitalism, in which Russia is integrated as a semi-peripheral nation. The Russian state has colonised its own periphery on behalf of the Western core, but has never been able to overcome economic and normative dependency on the West. The peculiar dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial during the post-Soviet period has given rise to a regime which claims to defend 'genuine Russian values', while in fact there is nothing behind this new traditionalism but the negation of Western hegemony. Trying to 'defend' the nation from the postulated threat of Western interventionism, the regime engages in a disavowal of politics and thus suppresses popular subjectivity. The only political subject that remains on the horizon of Russian politics is the West, while the Russian people, as any other subaltern, are being spoken for, and thus silenced, by the country's Eurocentric elites and the Western intellectuals.
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Pushing postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, this book looks at Russia as a subaltern empire. It demonstrates how the dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial has produced a radically anti-Western regime, which nevertheless remains locked in a Eurocentric outlook.
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1. The Postcolonial and the Imperial in the Space and Time of World Politics
2. Russia in/and Europe: Sources of Ambiguity
3. Material Dependency: Postcolonialism, Development and Russia's 'Backwardness'
4. Normative Dependency: Putinite Paleoconservatism and the Missing Peasant
5 The People are Speechless: Russia, the West and the Voice of the Subaltern
6. Conclusion
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Viatcheslav Morozov is Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu. Before moving to Estonia in 2010, he taught for thirteen years at the St Petersburg State University, Russia. He is the author of Russia and the Others: Identity and Boundaries of a Political Communit y and the editor of Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony .
eBook
Russian politics : a very short introduction
\"This book provides a concise and accessible overview that places Russia in a global context while explaining its internal political development. Russian politics is powerfully shaped by large, impersonal forces such as geography and Russia's place in the international political and economic system. At the same time, its formal political institutions, such as the Constitution and electoral procedures, are relatively weak and manipulable compared to those of stable, established democracies. Under these circumstances, powerful leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin represent a source of potential dynamism and change. To make sense of Russian politics, Brian Taylor grounds his discussion in an appreciation of some enduring influences, such as the primacy of the state over society and the role of the so-called \"West,\" which has represented a source of inspiration, of threat, and of competition for generations of Russians. At the same time, most of the focus is on the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. That revolutionary event brought about dramatic change across multiple spheres, from the nature of the political and economic system to the country's borders and who counted as a citizen. More than three decades later, Russia is still working its way through the consequences of these transformations\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Staging Democracy
Focusing on the experiences of people in Russia and Ukraine, Staging Democracy shows how some national leaders' seeming popularity rests on local economic compacts. Jessica Pisano draws on long-term research in rural communities and company towns, analyzing how local political and business leaders, seeking favor from incumbent politicians, used salaries, benefits, and public infrastructure to pressure citizens to participate in command performances. Pisano looks at elections whose outcome was known in advance, protests for hire, and smaller mises en scène to explain why people participate, what differs from spectacle in totalitarian societies, how political theater exists in both authoritarian and democratic systems, and how such performances reshape understandings of the role of politics. Staging Democracy moves beyond Russia and Ukraine to offer a novel economic argument for why some people support Putin and similar politicians. Pisano suggests we can analyze politics in both democracies and authoritarian regimes using the same analytical lens of political theater.
eBook
Restructuring post-communist Russia
A comprehensive overview and analysis of political change in Russia since 1991, examining the complex interplay between continuity and change that has marked developments in Russia under the leadership first of Boris Yeltsin and now of Vladimir Putin.
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Russian Notions of Power and State in a European Perspective, 1462-1725
This book highlights the main features and trends of Russian
\"political\" thought in an era when sovereignty, state, and
politics, as understood in Western Christendom, were non-existent
in Russia, or were only beginning to be articulated. It
concentrates on enigmatic authors and sources that shaped official
perception of rulership, or marked certain changes of importance of
this perception. Special emphasis is given to those written and
visual sources that point towards depersonalization and
secularization of rulership in Russia. A comparison with Western
Christendom frames the argument throughout the book, both in terms
of ideas and the practical aspects of state-building, allowing the
reader to ponder Russia's differentia specifica .
eBook