The new politics of Russia
Interpreting change
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9920101 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martin Dewhirst (University of Glasgow, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1492-1493 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-5850 • E-ISSN: 1468-2346 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ia/iix202 |
| OpenAlex | W2766083049 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
How new are the ‘new politics’ of Russia? How much change and how much continuity has there been? Have we seen much more separation of powers? Did the coup and counter-coup in 1991 amount to a revolution? Is ‘the Kremlin’ still trying to divide and weaken the West, if for different reasons? How federal is the Russian Federation, and how important were the sovety (councils) in Soviet Russia? Is the country still neo-Soviet or already in a post-Soviet condition? How relevant today are traditional Russian messianism (Moscow as the Third Rome etc.) and the more recent (neo-)Russian Eurasianism? Andrew Monaghan's compact and stimulating monograph is well worth reading, regardless of whether or not one agrees with his conviction that the Cold War (whether within Russia or between Russia and the West) is, however defined, a thing of the past. If some Russians are very edgy and tetchy these days, perhaps we should remember (a point not mentioned by the author) that nearly everyone in the USSR was obliged to study not only scientific ‘dialectical materialism’ but also scientific ‘historical materialism’, which ‘proved’ that capitalism would inevitably lead, sooner or later, to socialism. Now, after building state socialism for about three score years and ten, Russians are currently constructing state and state-controlled oligarchic capitalism, without questioning very deeply whether the Gulag might have been as great a crime against humanity as the Holocaust. Moreover, many of the present Russian leaders were doing quite well in the Soviet Union and appear to be as flexible in their alleged beliefs as was the ideal homo sovieticus so brilliantly described by Aleksandr Zinovev
Capitalism · Communism · Economic history · Gulag · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Russian history · Socialism · Sociology · State (computer science · History · Law · Russia and Soviet political economy
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |