Understanding Russian Authoritarianism

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Russia's political leaders constructed a new type of authoritarian political system. Many elements of the system were recognisable from the history of Russian autocracy or the experience of twentieth-century authoritarian states – the persecution of dissidents, the banning of demonstrations, attempts to censor the media, or the violation of laws by an untouchable political and security elite. But there were also innovative aspects of this political order, which reflected a very specific historical moment. The post-Soviet Russian political system emerged alongside, and in reaction to, a triumphant liberal international order, characterised by the march of liberal ideas and the rise of new technology. The system of power that developed in Russia under Vladimir Putin was always penetrated by and interwoven with a globalised economy and a set of liberal norms and ideas, creating a state marked by variegation, exception and hybridity. These contradictions in the Russian state were not a temporary aberration, but constituted innovative elements in a new type of post-liberal political system.

This complex and contradictory set of political dynamics encouraged scholars to conclude that Russia enjoyed a ‘peculiar combination of authoritarian and democratic elements’, and that Russia was best characterised as a ‘hybrid regime’ (Petrov et al. 2014: 2; Hale 2010; Robertson 2010; Treisman 2011). Yet hybridity was an unsatisfactory description of a political system that also corresponded clearly to traditional definitions of an authoritarian regime in terms of the classic question of political science: ‘who rules?’ Guillermo O’Donnell wrote that ‘all forms of authoritarian rule … have somebody (a king, a junta, a party committee, a theocracy, or what not) that is sovereign in the classic sense: if and when they deem it necessary, they can decide without legal constraint’ (O’Donnell 1998: 21, n 56). Russia under Putin corresponded to just such an understanding of authoritarianism, as a political regime above the law, a political system in which a single centre of power was able to make sovereign decisions without legal limitations.