Oleg Zhuravlev’s research while affiliated with Scuola Normale Superiore and other places

How has the transformation of the Russian economy and society in response to the challenges posed by the invasion of Ukraine affected popular support for the war? Scholars puzzled by the consistent majority support for the “special military operation” have tried to explain it by reference to the low reliability of opinion polls in Russia, imperialist attitudes toward Ukraine ingrained in Russian culture, or the deep depoliticization characteristic of the Putin regime. Looking at the development of the Russian war economy through the prism of the state-led macroeconomic policies known as “military Keynesianism,” however, we find that support for the war among at least part of Russian society may be rooted in material factors. The intensification of military production; the significant increase in payments to Russian soldiers, their relatives, and the police; the increase in military contracts; and import substitution in response to sanctions have all contributed to creating a conscious base of support among those groups benefiting materially from the war. If sustained over time, these effects could have significant consequences not only for the sustainability of support for a war of attrition and for Russia’s long-term confrontation with the West, but also for the transformation of the Russian economy and political regime, creating a positive feedback loop. However, the current economic and social effects of Russian military Keynesianism are contradictory—and some Russians who have seen their living standards decline due to its undesirable effects (like inflation) have become more critical of the war.

While Russia became widely known in the 1990s for its experiment in shock therapy, by the mid-2000s the Kremlin pioneered a new set of policies that amounted to the national variant of the developmentalist approach. In this article, we take stock of the Russian developmentalism, focusing on the role of ideas, the institution-building by the federal and regional governments as well as specific developmental policies. While state-oriented, interventionist approach to economic development has had some successes on the level of individual industries, regions and projects, on the whole, it failed to achieve transformational developmental outcomes. The economy has stagnated for over a decade and the Russian export basket is less sophisticated than it was 20 years ago. We argue that the failure of the Russian approach to developmentalism cannot be reduced to corruption and rent-seeking: the lack of an effective coordination mechanism and a consistent policy strategy underpinned by a foundation in heterodox economics have also played a role.

While Russia became widely known in the 1990s for its experiment in shock therapy, by the mid-2000s the Kremlin pioneered a new set of policies that amounted to the national variant of the developmentalist approach. In this article, we take stock of the Russian developmentalism, focusing on the role of ideas, the institution-building by the federal and regional governments as well as specific developmental policies. While state-oriented, interventionist approach to economic development has had some successes on the level of individual industries, regions and projects, on the whole, it failed to achieve transformational developmental outcomes. The economy has stagnated for over a decade and the Russian export basket is less sophisticated than it was 20 years ago. We argue that the failure of the Russian approach to developmentalism cannot be reduced to corruption and rent-seeking: the lack of an effective coordination mechanism and a consistent policy strategy underpinned by a foundation in heterodox economics have also played a role.

What explains the wide support for the invasion of Ukraine in Russia in the first months after it started? Many alleged that this support reflects an imperialist ideology permeating Russian society and culture. Based on a large set of in-depth interviews with supporters of the invasion among the regular Russian citizens, we argue that it is not a commitment to an imperialist ideology that is the most typical factor in support for the invasion but rather precisely the opposite-the deep depoliticization of Russian citizens , on which the support for Putin's regime has always been based. We explicate how the dynamics of depoliticization manifest themselves in the alienation of Russian citizens from articulating their own political positions, in the reproduction of the gap between the world of politics and of everyday life, and in the social construction of Ukrainians as a threat.

The chapter is considering contentious politics in Russia in the context of the permanent hegemony crisis that had been lasting over the last 30 years. The author analyzes how this context influenced the current political crisis and the protest mobilizations in Russia which are also considered against the background of recent protest movements and revolutions globally. The argument is made that the nowadays protest movement that challenges the Putin’s regime is a populist one. However, if populism in the left theory is defined as a hegemonic project that integrates various social demands into vague agenda, in a post-soviet context we deal with “populism by default” that avoids articulation of any social demands. Analyzing the outcomes of the recent revolutions in the post-soviet countries and beyond, the author claims that programmatically and ideologically vague movements are vulnerable for the risk of being appropriated by authoritarian leaders and elites. The author suggests what is to be done by the Russian left to overcome the crisis of hegemony by taking part in the protest movement.

This essay explores the dynamics of political polarization in Russia with a particular focus on class. We find that the divide between the pro-reform camp and the left-nationalist opposition in the 1990s had a distinctly class character. In the 2000s, the polarization in society receded – both due to the objective factors (sustained economic recovery) and Vladimir Putin’s clever symbolic politics. However, the price to pay was widespread political apathy and the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the 2010s, this regime was challenged by a new mass movement demanding fair elections and political liberties. The spell of depoliticization was broken, yet the new opposition politics had a rather narrow social base in the educated urban middle class. Furthermore, we find that the movement itself became the site of class formation, creating a common identity for the highly educated, yet often economically struggling intelligentsia and the successful private-sector professionals and entrepreneurs. In the subsequent years, the regime attempted to politicize its own supporters through conservative and nationalist propaganda, especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. During this period, the Kremlin pitted its loyal electorate in the rural and small-town ‘heartland’ against the ‘big city liberals’ who joined the opposition movement. Thus, the Russian regime acquired the familiar features of right-wing populism. Nevertheless, the Kremlin stopped one step away from creating its own loyalist street movement as it feared that such movement could eventually escape control and become dangerous for the regime itself. At the same time, Alexei Navalny, who by 2017-2018 assumed the leading role in the opposition movement, himself turned to populism, widening the movement’s social base and geographical scope. Currently, the regime struggles to maintain legitimacy, frequently resorting to repression. The opposition coalition is far wider than it was ten years ago, yet its populist politics is incoherent and contradictory. The Russian left, on the contrary, has a consistent set of programmatic commitments, yet it suffers from organizational weakness, ideological blind-spots and strategic mistakes. Nevertheless, both the opposition movement and its left wing carry on despite the constantly increasing pressure from an authoritarian state.

Revolutions have been plentiful in post-Soviet countries, but unlike classic revolutionary examples, they have been remarkably consistent in failing to establish a more stable political order and states autonomous from the influence of patronage. Post-revolutionary leaders and parties have either quickly lost power or had significant problems with re-election. Institutional and structural changes have remained limited. It has become typical in these countries to view these revolutions as just another cycle of elite circulation that "changed nothing." How can we explain this pattern of frequent but ineffective revolutions? We argue that post-Soviet revolutions have been responses to a severe crisis of political representation that their occurrence only reproduces and intensifies, explaining their frequency. Post-Soviet revolutions are thus deficient revolutions in which large-scale mass protest combines with revolutionary aspirations, rhetoric, and repertoires of collective action with only vaguely articulated claims, loose structures of mobilization, and weak and dispersed leadership. They generate a symbolic resource of revolutionary legitimacy, for which various political agents may compete and which they can hijack; however, they do not establish stable institutions of political representation. We illustrate this argument with the case of Ukraine's Euromaidan uprising-the most long-lasting, large-scale, violent but still deficient revolution in the post-Soviet region.

The paper analyzes the politicization of local activism in Russia caused by the 2011–12 protest movement “For Fair Elections”. The authors propose the theoretical model of an eventful social change at a micro level integrating different approaches such as pragmatic sociology, cultural sociology, eventful approach, and social movement studies. They argue that before the protests, Russian local activism was apolitical as it was based on the ethical opposition between (good) “real deeds” and (bad) “politics”, as well as on the anti-ideological belief in the authenticity of “self-evident” facts. The politicization of a-political activism was stimulated by the “eventful protests” of 2011–2012 and was not a break with a-politicism, but new arrangements of “self-evident” facts and ideological campaigning, of oppositional “politics” and getting real things done.

Based on a case study of Euromaidan Ukrainian nationalism, we argue that civic nationalism may derive more from a commitment to a particular political event than from a set of stable political ideas and principles. We concur that civic nationalism can be as exclusivist as ethnocultural nationalism , and we develop specific criteria and mechanisms of civic exclusion originating from the unique experience of participating in the Euromaidan event. Challenging the conceptual dichotomy of civic vs. ethnocultural nationalism, we suggest that these categories are still fruitful; however, they should be re-conceptualized. We try to clarify the relations between civic and ethnocultural forms of nationalism instead of simply considering them in opposition to each other. We show that a belief in the existence of a civic nation can legitimize the practices of othering, among them ethno-cultural exclusion, that are undertaken in the name of a civic nation.