Russia’s Muslims: A Growing Challenge for Moscow
In dealing with Russia’s Muslim minority, the government in Moscow is facing a challenge that is likely to become more serious in coming years. By most estimates, self-identified Muslims make…
The Political and Legal Parameters of Russian Decisionmaking on Abkhazia and South Ossetia
Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, was in some ways an anticlimactic event. It was widely expected, as were the immediate reactions: recognition by the United…
What Does Winning Mean in 2003?: A Candidate Centered Analysis of Upcoming Parliamentary Elections
In 1993, 1995, and 1999, analysts and politicians in both Russia and the United States made bold predictions about the outcomes of each national parliamentary election. Their predictions, based largely on the…
The End of ‘Primitive Capitalist Accumulation’?: The New Bankruptcy Law and the Political Assertiveness of Russian Big Business
One of the important long-term trends in Russian business since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been concentration, as a small number of business groups (the heads of which…
The Paradoxes of Kuchma’s Russian Policy
Since 1991, Kyiv has followed what has been termed a multi-vector approach in its foreign policy by trying to play a delicate balancing act between the United States and the European Union,…
Khodorkovsky’s Gamble: From Business to Politics in the YUKOS Conflict
Political battles in Russia have a reputation for being as obscure as they are vicious; thus Churchill’s famous comparison of Politburo rivals to bulldogs fighting under a carpet. Churchill’s saying now seems…
Wanted: A New U.S. Policy on Russia
Recent Russian parliamentary elections did much to expose the myth of “managed democracy” in that country. U.S. policymakers, however, had numerous (and bloody) reasons to be worried about Russia’s political course long…
The Extinction of Political Opposition in Russia
In the classic 1966 volume Political Oppositions in Western Democracies by Robert A. Dahl, the chapter on France in the early years of the Fifth Republic is titled “France: Nothing but…
The Gender Gap in Russian Politics and Elections
After the Soviet Communist Party's regime was replaced by a multiparty system in the 1990s, voting in Russia became a subject of intense interest to political scientists. Voters in Russia, as elsewhere,…
Is Russia Really an Ally?
U.S.-Russian relations have been strengthened considerably over the last year. Two developments led to this improvement: Russian president Vladimir Putin’s support for the United States in the aftermath of the…
Free but Unfair? The Problems of Electoral Governance in Russia
Democracy, as one political scientist noted, is a political regime in which rulers lose their offices because of electoral defeat. This is not the case in Russia; elections have not become,…
The Structures of Chechnya’s Quagmire
The current situation in Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion by British and U.S. forces made many analysts pay closer attention to the problems facing the Russian forces in Chechnya. Rather…