Soft Power: A Comparison of Discourse and Practice in Russia and China

This article compares soft power as a normative and operational construct in the Russian and Chinese political context. I examine Russian and Chinese discourse on soft power as well as the efforts of the Kremlin and Beijing to devise programmes for its implementation. I then compare and evaluate the similarities and differences in Russian and Chinese soft power strategy. The similarities between the two states indicate their joint status as authoritarian regimes with a Marxist–Leninist heritage. The differences can be attributed to their vastly disparate economic circumstances, but also to historical, social, and political factors that influence soft power policies.     

The Representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Twenty-first Century Russian Media

The aim of this study is to investigate the representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in contemporary Russian media discourse. Attention is paid to Gorbachev's social roles and activities as well as his personality, as presented in Russian news texts. The empirical data were collected over the period from 2000 to 2009 from seven major Russian newspapers. According to these data, a dual relationship to Gorbachev exists: in the West he is an honoured politician with a high profile, whereas in Russia the attitude towards him is ambivalent. In most texts he is represented as a once important political actor.     

Lives on the border: language and culture in the lives of ethnic Russian women in Baltinava,Latvia

This study draws on ethnographic research conducted in a small village, Baltinava in Latvia, 2.5 kilometres from the border with Russia. The research examines how ethnic Russian women create a specific Latvian Russian identity by contrasting themselves from ethnic Latvians and Russians who live in Russia and identifying with both groups at the same time. To narrate their lives and to make them meaningful, real and/or perceived “attributes” are combined to draw boundaries between “us” and “them.” Thus, the same thing such as language can be used not only both to distinguish themselves from Russians in Russia or Latvians but also to form coherent identities and to emphasize similarities. This study suggests that ethnicities cannot be reduced to a list of set ethnic groups that are very often used in official government statistics. Ethnic identities have to be viewed as fluid and situational. Moreover, this study shows the dialectic nature of ethnicity. On the one hand, external political, historical and social processes create and recreate ethnic categories and definitions. Yet, on the other hand, the women in this study are active agents creating meaningful and symbolic ethnic boundaries.     

Power-loss or power-transition? Assessing the limits of using the energy sector in reviving Russia’s geopolitical stature

The paper seeks to evaluate the scope and limits of the Russian state’s capacity to use oil and natural gas as strategic resources to revive Russia’s fortunes as a credible global power. It offers an analysis of the evolution of state-markets interactions in the energy sector from the late Gorbachev era to the present day. The paper briefly documents how Russian foreign policy became more assertive using energy as a strategic resource, particularly in crafting its relations with the European Union. Subsequently, the paper analyzes Russia’s limits of using energy as leverage in securing foreign policy objectives. Finally, it points to the impediments to normalizing a Russo-EU energy dialog.     

The evolution of Russian federalism and its current fiscal dilemmas: an institutional account

In order to make sense of the fiscal component of the emergent federalism in the post-Soviet Russian political system, this article provides an historical-institutional analysis which charts over time the development both of legal frameworks and informal political contexts, thus providing an overview of the changing mix of constraints, resources, and strategic opportunities present to actors occupying various roles within the federal system. Several discrete stages in the evolution of Russian federalism from the late Gorbachev era to the present are identified. According to this analysis, Russia's political system has elements of genuine federalism, but federalization is constrained by specific attributes of the Soviet legacy. Russian federalism is asymmetrical, that is, ethnically defined subunits (the republics) enjoy greater powers than their non-ethnically defined counterparts. This asymmetry may have been a necessary response to the ethnic ambitions of the so- called “autonomous” entities inherited from the Soviet era. At the same time, however, some of the non-ethnic subunits (principally the oblasts, or regions) have demanded similar rights of autonomy, especially with regard to control of natural resources, shared tax revenues, and other economic concerns. Developments since the mid-1990s suggest a modest return of power to the federal center at the expense of the subunits, but the latter still enjoy a degree of independence unheard of during the Soviet period. Meanwhile, there has been a trend toward equalization of economic powers between the republics and oblasts. Still worrisome, however, are the disparities in wealth among the various subunits and the penchant for self-enrichment on the part of leaders of otherwise impoverished regions and republics.     

Political Symbolism and the Fall of the USSR

When Gorbachev came to power he inherited not simply a system in crisis, but a structure of symbols that was embedded within the broader political system and which was also in crisis. Given the ideocratic nature of the Soviet system, any change to that system would require symbolic change as well. This essay charts how Gorbachev sought to come to grips with this problem, investing some symbols with new meaning while rejecting others. It shows how ultimately he was unable to produce a new, coherent narrative.     

Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low,learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?†

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success ? in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure.     

Gorbachev, ideology, and the fate of Soviet communism

The collapse of the Soviet Union has spurred much scholarly debate about the reasons for the rapid disintegration of this apparently entrenched system. In this article, it is argued that the basic source of ultimate weakness was the obverse of the system's strengths, especially its form of organization and its relation to Marxist–Leninist ideology. Democratic centralism provided cohesion for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) but also gave inordinate control over ideology to the party leader. Mikhail Gorbachev carried out an ideological revision that undercut the legitimacy of party elites and his restructuring of the system left the party with no clear functional role in the society. The successor party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), has made a surprising comeback for communism, utilizing the Leninist model of party organization, which has proved to be highly effective in the Russian political culture. Furthermore, the CPRF, under party leaders like Gennadi Zyuganov, has avoided Gorbachev's ideological deviations while attempting to broaden the party's base through the cultivation of Russian nationalism.     

Prisoners' Wives in Post-Soviet Russia: ‘For my Husband I am Pining!’

The identity of a prisoner's wife is often a shameful societal stigma. Yet Russia's unique history of imprisonment has provided an unusually positive trope for women who have to come to terms with their partners' incarceration: the ‘Decembrist wife’ (dekabristka). This trope originated in the aftermath of the 1825 ‘Decembrist’ uprising—the first anti-monarchist revolt in modern Russian history. A handful of wives of the perpetrators voluntarily joined their husbands in Siberian exile and, in leaving behind families and comforts, created a precedent to be glorified for future generations. Upheld in Russian national mythology as a model of the exemplary wife, the dekabristka identity lives on. This paper examines its enduring power and significance in contemporary Russia.     

Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?

As General Secretary, Gorbachev evolved from a Communist reformer to a socialist of the social democratic type. The most important programmatic documents of the CPSU in 1990–1991, on which Gorbachev had the predominant influence, were essentially social democratic. (Many in the Party apparatus had no intention of implementing them.) From 1988, Gorbachev was advocating fundamental change of the Soviet system, although there were zig-zags in his public pronouncements under the pressure of events. Ill-understood both at home and abroad, Gorbachev's social democratic ideas were ‘outflanked’ by the market fundamentalism and political impatience of his radical opponents and frustrated by the implacable enmity of conservative defenders of the vanishing Communist party-state.     

Tackling tensions and ambivalences: Armenian girls' diasporic identities in Russia

Research on diasporic youth identities in the British and American context has stressed hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This paper draws upon ethnographic research undertaken with Armenian girls to explore some of the tensions and ambivalences of negotiating diasporic identities in the Russian context. Diasporic identities are constructed through gender, and this paper illustrates how research participants negotiate their identities in relation to both belonging to the Armenian community and wider Russian society. At the same time, this paper examines how research participants draw differently on diasporic identifications in order to overcome tensions and ambivalences in their everyday lives. The paper shows that research participants are not inclined to reject their cultural roots in favor of new hybrid identities, but are able to recognize and appropriate different cultures in their identity negotiations.     

Who has led Russia? Russian regional political elites, 1954 – 2006

Quantitative measures are used to compare the age, tenure, gender and change of political elites in 18 Russian regions from 1954 to 2006. The study finds more similarities than differences between regional elites from the Soviet era and from the post-Soviet Russian era. The Russian regional political elite since 1992 is actually older than the Soviet elite and resembles it quite closely in terms of years in office and turnover, comparing both the total time spans of the elites of each era and at 10-year intervals from 1956 through to 2006. Even in relation to differences by region and gender since 1992, there has been a re-emergence of a regional political establishment in a similar pattern to that of the Soviet era.     

Discourse and strategic continuity from Gorbachev through Putin

Discourse analysis reveals that Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary and his successors as Russian presidents have practiced a shared strategy of metaphorical – not spatial – centrism that has gradually slid the state from dictatorship toward democracy. Preservation of a political center for himself and his successors to occupy made it necessary for Boris Yeltsin to dismantle the USSR if elections in Russia were to continue. At the same time, for each successive exponent of this centrist strategy, an attempt to practice democracy without the repellent flaws of electoral fraud and political repression would forgo the strategic advantage of occupying the political center.     

Sources of Income,Mental Health and Quality of Life in Rural Russia

This article reports on a survey examining sources of income and their effects on the mental health and subjective quality of life of residents in nine rural Russian regions. Using conventional measures of depressed mood and respondents' assessments of the quality of their lives in different domains, the authors find that the emergence of a mixed economy, that generates income from salary and wages and household enterprises, as well as government transfers, has produced differentiation in the subjective psychological as well as material quality of rural residents' lives.     

Making Baikal Russian: Imperial Politics at the Russian–Qing Border

The article discusses power asymmetries and transcultural entanglements in the Baikal region on the border between the Russian and Qing empires. The Russian imperial authorities used transculturality, the diversity of the regional population and its transboundary connections, as a resource in their attempts to control parts of the former Qing Empire, but at the same time they tried to reduce it through Russification, Christianisation, and the homogenisation of social groups, which led to protest and instability instead of the anticipated results. Consolidation of Russian rule in some spheres undermined its control over others and led to an unexpected increase in cultural and political diversity.     

Russia and the Iraq War: was Putin's policy a failure?

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has been faced with numerous crises since coming to office in 2000, most importantly the war in Chechnya, the Iraq War was the first major international crisis with which his administration was confronted. As in the case of Kosovo for Yeltsin, and the Gulf War for Gorbachev, the Russian President had to deal with conflicting domestic pressures and apparently still more conflicting Russian national and international interests. Indeed, one result of such a situation was a post-war accusation that Putin actually had no policy or at least no consistent policy with regard to the Iraq crisis [Golan, G., 1992. Gorbachev's difficult time in the Gulf. Political Science Quarterly 107 (2), 213–230]. One may remember similar accusations of Gorbachev's “zigzaging” in the Gulf War and claims that the Yeltsin government failed to forge a Kosovo policy altogether [Levitin, O., 2000. Inside Moscow's Kosovo muddle. Survival 42 (1), 130]. Yet, a certain pattern did appear to repeat itself in the Iraqi crisis, namely, pre-war efforts to prevent a military conflict from breaking out, then gradual escalation of rhetoric if not actual involvement, and finally gradual but relatively rapid retreat to conciliatory posture toward the United States (in all three crises). Moreover, Putin was indeed consistent throughout the pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis periods in his opposition to the Americans' use of force against Iraq and in the need to remain within a United Nations framework. Actually, one might ask (and we shall below) why Putin did not abandon the first part of this policy, in order to maintain the second component, when it became certain that the U.S. was going to attack with or without UN Security Council approval.     

Farewell to the Caucasus: Regional ethnic clan politics and the growing instability of the ruling elite after the 2012 presidential elections in Russia

One of the most lingering questions about Russian politics that dominates public discourse and media coverage is the future of political regime after the 2012 presidential elections. The answer to this question is inextricably linked to the extent of differences between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, how long their “tandemocracy” will last and what can bring about regime change as scarce critics of the Kremlin, from ultra-liberals to communists, have been haphazardly co-opted into the power system, leaving no political ambitions that they would not, in principle, be ready to abandon in return for proper compensation.In sharp contrast to the views of many regional experts and commentators, the present-day Russian Federation is the world's most anti-Soviet state. It is based upon a very different set of values: private ownership, dire individualism, the cult of money, a clan-based political system, and pervasive corruption at all levels of government. The North Caucasus ethnocratic elites, however, do not have access to abundant resources for sale, and are forced to look around for alternative sustenance, as rigid centralism and unification limit their rent-seeking capabilities. Alexander Khloponin, the incumbent presidential envoy in charge of the North Caucasus Federal District, seems to continue the policy of buying the loyalty of regional archaic clan-based elites that aggravates rather than improves the situation.The paper addresses this puzzle: why, against rigorous rhetoric and demonstration of tight grip over the region, neither Putin nor Medvedev has real power to bring change to the North Caucasus? In an attempt to solve this puzzle, the paper examines the triadic relationship among central political elite, who benefited from the massive privatisation of lucrative segments of Soviet industry in the early 1990s, regional clan-based ethnocracy, and non-systemic religious opposition. Drawing on the works of Russian scholars and experts in Russian politics, the paper explores the hypothesis that on-going instability in the North Caucasus can no longer be explained by a well-known set of theories of ethnic violence, because it is carefully negotiated by regional and central political elite, who do not see the North Caucasus as an indispensable part of the Russian Federation and whose clan-based rent-seeking agendas have gradually driven Russian statehood into a complete dead-end. Instead of facing the real challenges that are addressed in this paper, it is only able to make a public show of action on the eve of crucial political campaigns: the 2012 presidential elections and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The paper concludes that the deep freeze in the Russian political system has exhausted its debatable potential for change through the existing tandem model of government with its obscure division of roles between two leaders. What we actually see is an imitation of political reform and the resulting degradation of the entire system of governance. Over the past century, Russian polity has never been as weak as today, because the only legitimate source of power in Russia is corruption.     

Local Chairs vs International Networks: the Beginning of the Scholarly Career in a Peripheral Academic Field

Sensitive to the differences between centers and peripheries of knowledge production, this article explores how scholars in peripheral fields use knowledge from central fields to structure their academic careers. The article presents the findings of a case study of career choices of political scientists in Argentina. In order to understand the interplay between foreign knowledge and local strategies of enacting networks, this article focuses on the beginning of academic careers. At this early stage, political scientists in Argentina usually have to make a decision whether to stay in the country or go abroad for postgraduate education. Relying on positioning theory and recent developments in Science and Technology Studies, we identified two alternative positioning strategies. Those who stay in Argentina tend to hoard as many scholarly positions as possible, enacting local networks oriented towards teaching. Scholars who go abroad enact networks with international dimensions, in the process enrolling persons and objects, though not always successfully. Scholars with international experience tend to be research oriented, and they mention the working conditions abroad as particularly attractive. We show the extent to which these findings challenge some views of centers and periphery and highlight the active role of scholars in peripheral scientific fields.     

The Russian Constitutional Court and the Communist Party case: Watershed or whitewash?

Constitutional Courts stand at the interface between law and politics, as the newly formed Russian Constitutional Court exemplified during Russia's time of troubles between 1991 and 1993. One Constitutional Court case from that period had particular significance. The Russian court considered the constitutionality of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Russian Communist Party (CP RSFSR). The seven month long hearing tested the court's stamina and resolve. Described before it began as ‘Russia's Nuremberg’, was the Communist Party case a turning point in Russia's relationship with her past, or was it a staged showpiece with no real impact? This paper explores the Russian Constitutional Court's longest case and its effects.     

Pussy Riot as agent provocateur: conspiracy theories and the media construction of nation in Putin's Russia

This article studies the impact of conspiracy theories on post-Soviet Russian nation-building through the analysis of how the Pussy Riot trial was constructed by the Russian media. Conspiracy theory as a phenomenon is defined as a populist tool for relocation of power among different political actors, which creates identities and boosts social cohesion. This interpretation of conspiracy theories helps investigate how the media constructed the image of Pussy Riot and their supporters as a conspiring subversive minority, which threatened the Russian nation. The ability of conspiracy theory for swift social mobilization helped the authorities to strengthen the public support of its policies and model the Russian nation as ethnically and religiously homogeneous.