Civil–Military Relations and Institutional Decay: Explaining Russian Military Politics

The Russian military's extraordinary decline is widely known. The changing political role of high-ranking officers and the different treatment they have been subjected to by Russian presidents has received relatively little scholarly attention, however. This article analyses this phenomenon—including the military elites' electoral participation, relationship to the executive, and opposition to state policy—and offers a method for explaining it. To generate a more penetrating understanding of Russian particularities while expanding our theoretical reach, the article combines the civil–military relations literature with that of the institutionalist approach, and more specifically, the concepts of path dependence and institutional decay.