Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes by Vladimir Gel’man (review)

If we grant that the contemporary Russian regime can justifiably be called authoritarian, rather than a “sovereign democracy,” a “democracy with Russian characteristics,” or an original “non-Western democracy” as some Russians and Western political scientists might propose, there are still different ways of describing it. Political scientists are habitually preoccupied with the role of elections in authoritarian societies. Recent research on authoritarianism highlights the simultaneously stabilizing, deliberalizing, and democratizing potentials of elections.¹ That is, the argument goes, authoritarian retrenchment and political opening can be seen as the result of the same processes inherent to elections, because, even when they take place on an uneven playing field, elections are about signaling and generating information and, for this reason alone, always have great potential to change the strategies of key actors, including the masses.

Regional tendencies are also observable: for instance, whereas scholars of the Middle East point out the usefulness of elections to authoritarianism, studies of the former communist states and sub-Saharan Africa hail their liberalizing effects (cf., e.g. “color revolutions”). Within the regional framework Russia, with its botched “transition” from Soviet rule to a Western-style democracy in the 1990s and its escalation of anti-Western sentiments and suppression of internal dissent in the 2010s, does not easily fit into the ranks of East European democracies. There is, however, no scholarly consensus on how to characterize the political trajectory of Russia; there are open issues,² and Vladimir Gel’man’s new book, Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes, suggests viewing the country’s political regime as a case study of “electoral” or “competitive” authoritarianism. The aim of the book is to explain what the author calls the “how” and “why,” or “the logic”, of this political development, covering the period from the end of state socialism to present-day arbitrary authoritarian rule. On the back of Russia’s political trajectory and choices of its rulers, the book also attempts to shed light on the sources of strength and weakness of electoral authoritarianisms more generally.

The unfolding story of Russia is told in chronological order. The first two introductory theoretical chapters are followed by three chapters, each corresponding to a post-Soviet decade and capturing its image in the title: “The Roaring 1990s,” “The (In)famous 2000s,” “The Unpredictable 2010s.” The final, concluding chapter of the book is a pondering over Russia’s alternative futures. Gel’man’s excursus into Russian politics starts with an earnest declaration of his own cynical view of the political enterprise. Together with many post-Soviets he had firsthand experience of the 1990s, “the road of disillusionment,” but his personal disillusionment – a realization that the goal of politicians (any politicians) is the maximization of power by any means – was such that as a young Russian activist-democrat he simply turned away from professional politics altogether. This reading of the incumbent rulers (“there are no ‘bad’ or ‘good’ guys”) underlies Gel’man’s “realist” standpoint and acts as the book’s conceptual red thread.

Chapter 1 sets the scene, introducing key concepts related to electoral authoritarianism as well as the overall argument: the elites and the formal and informal rules of the game define the outcomes of power struggles. The masses are not real players and hardly involved; “carrots” rather than “sticks” are the preferred mode of domination. Gel’man seems to share the views of those political scientists who deny the force of political traditions and attribute the shape of Russia’s political trajectory to the decisions of the incumbents. He argues that there are no specific structural, cultural, or historical determinants for Russia’s becoming an authoritarian state; its only misfortune is that the power-maximizing strategies of the rulers were not tamed by institutional constraints because the latter were largely absent. Elections are kept because it is a ritual legitimization of their power, but there is a total lack of an ideology that could...