Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- Resisting the State
- 1 W(h)ither the Russian State?
- 2 Apparatchiki into “Entrepreneurchiki”: The Sources of Russia's Weak Central State
- 3 Governing Russia: Patterns of Regional Resistance to the Central State
- 4 Inside the Russian State: Assessing Infrastructural Power in the Provinces
- 5 Retrenchment over Reform: Obstacles to the Central State in the Periphery
- 6 Weak National Parties, Weak Central State
- 7 The Comparative Implications of Russia's Weak State Syndrome
- Index
1 - W(h)ither the Russian State?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- Resisting the State
- 1 W(h)ither the Russian State?
- 2 Apparatchiki into “Entrepreneurchiki”: The Sources of Russia's Weak Central State
- 3 Governing Russia: Patterns of Regional Resistance to the Central State
- 4 Inside the Russian State: Assessing Infrastructural Power in the Provinces
- 5 Retrenchment over Reform: Obstacles to the Central State in the Periphery
- 6 Weak National Parties, Weak Central State
- 7 The Comparative Implications of Russia's Weak State Syndrome
- Index
Summary
The twentieth century was bracketed by two seminal events: the formation of the Soviet Union through the revolution of 1917, and the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. Far from being the end of history that Karl Marx might have predicted, the withering and then demise of the Soviet state brought with it the rebirth of Russia. In the early 1990s many hoped that the renewed Russian state would succeed where its Soviet predecessor had ultimately failed – in the provision of public goods and services to an exhausted and impoverished population.
After more than a decade of incomplete reform, however, few Russians had attained the benefits of their nation's most recent great transformation. Indeed, the central state's halting abilities to extract revenues, enforce contracts, pay public sector wages on time, provide meaningful poverty relief or even basic social services defined the immediate post-Soviet transition effort. This book identifies the Russian state's inability to extend its authority across the vast Eurasian landmass as the primary problem of post-communist governance. Indeed, the task became so challenging that Russia's second post-communist president, Vladimir Putin, using the tragic deaths of hundreds of schoolchildren and their parents at the hands of Chechen insurgents in the southern town of Beslan, opted by the fall of 2004 to abandon even the pretense of democracy in Russia's provinces in favor of more centralized control.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Resisting the StateReform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006