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Pluralism without Democracy, Vertical without Power: From Gor΄kii to Nizhnii Novgorod … and Back?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2019

Andrey Makarychev
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Abstract

This article discusses the political trajectory of the Nizhnii Novgorod region from the beginning of the 1990s until the present; from the first democratic experiences to their repudiation. The author traces the main cycles of region's political developments and defines the specificity of its political system and relations with the federal center. The article looks at the evolution of the political landscape in the region from the first post-Soviet years to mature Putinism, and then explains how political controversies are reflected in the regional identity debate. It proposes an alternative to the binary vision of the 1990s as a struggle between liberal reformists and authoritarian retrogrades, rather approaching the 1990s, with Boris El'tsin's presidency and Boris Nemtsov's governorship in Nizhnii Novgorod, as a period that encompassed many of the non-democratic trends that under Vladimir Putin's regime became dominant.

Type
Managing Regional Diversity
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , Winter 2018 , pp. 957 - 977
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

This work was supported by Institutional Research Funding (IUT20–39) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.

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