The Kremlin’s ability to maintain power and popularity despite an aging leader, an ailing economy, a rallying opposition, and many other domestic and international challenges is puzzling given current theories of authoritarianism. These theories focus on some combination of material interests, institutional engineering, and the charisma and skill of the dictator himself. A close examination of the Russian case, however, reveals that the real power of Putin’s dictatorship lies in the realm of ideas and emotions that chime with powerful currents in society, which in turn shape and limit the Kremlin’s strategies.
About the Authors
Graeme B. Robertson
Graeme Robertson, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia (2011).
Samuel Greeneis director of King’s Russia Institute at King’s College London and author of Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (2014).
Why are the unfree regimes of the former Soviet world proving so durable? A lack of ideology and—perhaps surprisingly—a degree of openness are proving to be not so much problems…
