Russian citizens view the state simultaneously as their leader and their oppressor. They want their state to be a strong, benevolent, and fair leader, but just as often they feel mistreated by it. In post-Soviet Russia, Vladimir Putin’s government has used the desire of Russians to have a strong and fair state as a leader in order to coopt civil society. It created incentives for civil society organizations to pursue their causes through cooperation with state officials rather than through demanding accountability and confronting the state. Russian civil society organizations face a choice whether to accept such offers and collaborate with the state or not, weighing the benefits and repercussions of both paths. This chapter discusses Russia’s civil society in the context of this choice, separating the “collaborating” and the “resisting” parts of it, considers their role in Russian politics, and demonstrates the forces inside civil society that contribute to the stability and fragility of the Putin regime.

The equations governing flows of Newtonian viscous incompressible fluids were reviewed in Chapter 2. The equations are revisited here, in the Cartesian component form, for the two-dimensional case (i.e., set $v_z=0$ and the derivatives with respect to $z$ to zero).

In the languages we’ve examined so far, when we have a high-level problem like “see if a list contains an interesting element,” we can define a high-level, problem-specific function like exists?. But we can’t yet define problem-specific data; no matter what problem we’re working on, our code is written in terms of representations like numbers, symbols, Booleans, lists, S-expressions, and constructed data. We should hope for better; if we’re implementing high-level actions like “find the rule in the table,” “multiply two 50-digit numbers,” or “stop recording when the event is over,” then our code should be written in terms of abstractions like tables, large numbers, and events. Such abstractions can be defined by the language features described in the last two chapters of this book.

A running μScheme program continually allocates fresh locations. How are they supplied? Memory is limited, and malloc will eventually run out. Memory can be recovered using free, but if a programmer must call free, as in C and C++, they risk memory errors: leaks, locations that are freed multiple times, and misuse of freed locations (so-called dangling-pointer errors). Memory errors can make a program crash—or, worse, silently produce wrong answers. But in languages like μScheme, full Scheme, Java, and JavaScript, which are memory-safe, such errors are impossible. The errors are prevented because the implementation of μScheme, not the μScheme programmer, figures out when it is safe to reuse a location. The techniques used to reuse locations safely are demonstrated in this chapter.

The languages of the preceding chapters, Impcore and μScheme, are dynamically typed, which is to say that many faults, such as applying a function to the wrong number of arguments, adding non-numbers, or applying car to a symbol, are not detected until run time. Dynamically typed languages are very flexible, but on any given execution, a fault might surprise you; even a simple mistake like typing cdr when you meant car might not have been detected on previous runs. And using cdr instead of car doesn’t cause a fault right away: cdr simply returns a list in a context where you were expecting an element. But if, for example, you then try to add 1 to the result of applying cdr, that is a checked run-time error: adding 1 to a list instead of a number. To rule out such errors at compile time, without having to run the faulty code, a programming language can use static typing.

Drawing on feminist and LGBTQ+ scholarship, this chapter discusses the role of gender and sexuality in Russian politics, which has risen in significance over the past two decades. It addresses Soviet legacies of gender and sexual norms in contemporary Russia, the use of homophobia by Putin’s regime, and feminist and LGBTQ+ grassroots mobilizations. Most notably, the chapter shows how the Russian government has instrumentalized homophobia via the infamous “gay propaganda” legislation and the utilization of the concept of “traditional family values.” Domestically, the regime’s application of political homophobia has resulted in a discursive othering of LGBTQ+ Russians, as well as a marked increase in anti-LGBTQ+ violence and discrimination. Internationally, the Russian government’s efforts advance its anti-“Western” stand and allow it to claim leadership in global conservative alliances. At the same time, this regime of repression has resulted in a proliferation of varied forms of feminist and LGBTQ+ resistance, paradoxically becoming a legitimate part of Russian opposition politics. The chapter concludes by discussing ways in which the diverse front of Russian LGBTQ+ and feminist activists have responded to the sexism, heteronormativity, and silencing efforts of the government and mainstream Russian society.

This chapter will discuss how race resonates in Russia, paying special attention to the current developments in racial politics. Contemporary racial politics in Russia is ambivalent and complex. Russian citizenship does not depend on racial or ethnic belonging but on civic loyalty. Nevertheless, despite all the calls for a civil Russian nation, we witness the growing importance of racial discourse, promoting an ethnoracial understanding of Russianness. This chapter examines racialization processes in Russia against the backdrop of a conservative turn in Vladimir Putin’s politics. It shows that deeply rooted legacies of racial thinking and practices continue to inform current conceptions of identity in the post-Soviet space. It then argues that racial issues in Russia should be regarded neither as something extreme and abnormal, nor as a disease infecting only certain political figures and subcultures. It is the racialization of mainstream political discourse in Russia – whether it be left, right, or liberal – that encourages the practices of race and the formation of racial identity, leading to new forms of racial governance. Racialization coexists uneasily with the official policy of antifascism. This dualism characterizes post-Soviet racial public discourse and policy leading to uncertainty about Russian identity and to tensions in Russian politics.

There are several topics that are considered to be “advanced” for this book. We will briefly discuss some (but not all) of these topics to make the readers aware of the fact that the present coverage has precluded them, and then cover three topics in a greater detail.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society has been molded by different ideological forces. Those representing conservative values – understood as a combination of references to the national culture’s exceptionalism, Orthodoxy, and a vague “traditional values” narrative – have historically comprised a plurality, and even sometimes a majority. The Presidential Administration under Vladimir Putin has been capturing that dynamic to its own advantage, trying to secure the political loyalty of these conservative-minded segments of the population and mobilize them in support of the regime. Within this conservative segment, the Russian Orthodox Church has been gaining in influence to the point that it is now Russia’s key ideological entrepreneur, pushing for a “moralization” of society and politics and developing lobbying strategies to penetrate secular state institutions: the military, the school system, and the judiciary. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has dramatically shifted the conservative equilibrium toward justifying mass violence against Ukraine and repression at home.

Over the past two decades, the quest for economic stability and security has become a leading principle of contemporary Russian macroeconomic policies. To understand the genesis of these fundamental building blocks of Russia’s macroeconomic policies, the chapter provides a chronology of key policy choices and macroeconomic developments from the financial crisis of August 1998 to the aftermath of the global financial crisis ten years later. The painful fallout of recurring economic crises, most notably in the 1990s and after the global financial crisis of 2008, has shaped Russia’s recent policy choices in fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. During President Vladimir Putin’s first two terms in office in 2000–08, the Russian government reformed public finances, restructured sovereign debt, and wisely created a Stabilization Fund for a rainy day. These fiscal buffers cushioned the economy against some direct effects of the 2008 and 2014 crisis. Since 2012, it has become clear that conservative fiscal and monetary policies alone are not enough to support economic growth or increase household welfare. The sanctions and trade restrictions that are the result of geopolitical tensions with the West added further weight and urgency to Russia’s search for economic security at the expense of other economic priorities, such as social policy or improving the investment climate.

Russia is a multiethnic and multireligious polity, with a long history of managing ethnic and religious identities and group allegiances. This chapter first briefly introduces the Russian Empire’s multireligious and multiethnic structure before proceeding to the critical transformations of ethnic and religious identities in the Soviet period. Soviet policies promoted and ideologically reformulated ethnolinguistic identities as the building blocks of a multiethnic federation. Soviet official policies toward religion were also a central element of a great transformation that elevated ethnicity and imbued it with socialist content as a primordial social identity, while persecuting and downgrading religious identities. The chapter then addresses the post-Soviet period and the changes in ethnic policies that took place from Yeltsin to Putin. In the Yeltsin years, the pendulum swung between two extremes of ethnic policies, represented by Yeltsin’s call for ethnic republics to “take as much sovereignty as [they] can swallow” in 1990 and his decision to invade Chechnya in 1994. During this period, majority and minority religions experienced a significant revival. After the 2000s, official policies accelerated processes of assimilation, and the revival and salience of ethnic and religious identities are related to domestic power struggles and foreign policy. Putin has used the Russian Orthodox Church in support of his domestic and international political goals in a way no Russian leader has done since the tsars, and he also relied on ethnic Russian nationalism in legitimizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea.