This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
After abandoning the Soviet Union, Russia prolonged and reproduced the same basic system, but without communism. In comparison, Ukraine is on the positive side of the process of taking shape as a state and a nation.
Will the breakthrough model suggested by Shinzo Abe, that is the combination of financial stimulus, concentration of powers in his hands, new nationalism, military strength, and return to geopolitics, be successful?
With Navalny’s current agenda the Navalny Myth cannot become a systemic alternative to the one man rule.
Snowden did not create the security-privacy dilemma, but he did illuminate a deeply rooted problem that Western leaders have long tried to obscure.
The Kremlin pays the price to pacify and accommodate the North Caucasus which is evidence of the Russian state’s fragility.
Russia’s trajectory toward a harsher political regime and its attempts to contain the Western influence create formidable obstacles for the liberalization of the other post-Soviet states. The real breakthrough is possible only when Russia starts moving the ball, rejects the personalized power system, and begins searching for a new paradigm.
While the world waits for a Fourth Wave of Democracy, it is witnessing a diametrically different phenomenon: a surge of new authoritarianism.
Both the causes and nature of the Russian and Turkish protests, as well as the two regimes’ reactions to them, are strikingly similar. Despite the criticism leveled at Putin and Erdogan, the protests in both countries are not threatening the principles that support the system and the state—yet.
The Russian and Chinese states are trying to use Snowden, as well as Assange, to discredit liberal democracies—above all, the United States. The Kremlin also sees the Snowden case as a way to crack down on democratic freedoms inside of Russia.
Iranian system resembles Russian matryoshka–doll—you open one doll and there is another inside. The first matryoshka—the regime embodied by the presidency—is the subject for beating and for doing unpleasant things. Inside the shell is the real power—the authority of the Supreme Leader.
