Two shocking examples of projecting the moral bad are presented in this chapter: Hitler’s and Putin’s worldviews. The deeper commonalities in the social identities they propagated are analyzed: dehumanization, purification, internal unity/external division, and enemy image construction. This leads to some practical implications: recognizing the existence of moral multiplicity instead of moral dualism, avoiding the identification of people on the basis of one category only, replacing social categories by personalized I-positions, broadening one’s moral circle beyond one’s favorite ingroup, intergroup contact, promoting a superordinate identity, developing an overarching meta-position, and creating access to the moral middle ground.

The institutions of the developmental states set up in the postwar period began to crumble in the 1980s as liberalisation took hold. Isolationist approaches were on the back foot. However, this did not mark the end of economic nationalism. Nation-states were now recast as agents shaping competitiveness and therefore growth. This process is visible in the Baltic states breaking free from the Soviet Union, in Malaysia of the 1990s, and most importantly in reform-era China. Beyond these similarities, the differences are equally enlightening. China’s reforms as conceived by Deng Xiaoping saw an initially cautious, but increasingly rapid, dismantling of Maoist autarky, with the ‘rejuvenation’ of the nation becoming the principal aim. Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad only slowly moved towards a developmental policy, because policy also tried to achieve the economic advancement of ethnic Malays over the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. Finally, not all independent states born from the Soviet dissolution could turn to the West. Ukraine in the early 1990s remained caught between internal divisions and increasingly aggressive Russian policy.

Chapter 5 introduces the analysis of popular opinion in electoral autocracies with a comparative analysis of the paradigmatic case of Russia. The chapter first outlines the scope and consequences of Russia’s catastrophic post-Communist cataclysm, and how this traumatic experience prompted ordinary Russians to place an absolute premium on restoring order and stability – outlooks that made Vladimir Putin’s tough-mannered style of governing incredibly popular. Using a uniquely rich dataset of 418 surveys for the 1993-2011 period, produced by Russia’s Levada Center, this chapter demonstrates that in societies traumatized by upheaval, the strongman appeal trumps ideological, programmatic, and value orientations, and aligns mass opinion and political competition along a new cleavage: the choice of whether to accept or reject electoral authoritarianism as a regime that can impose order. I show that this cleavage inhibits and divides the opposition and highlights its shortcomings, allowing even weakly performing autocracies to retain power through elections.

Where does the Russian case or, rather, the two distinct periods of terrorism in Russia, stand vis-à-vis the world’s historical waves of terrorism, from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century? What are the key aspects specific to the main types of terrorism in post-Soviet Russia (i.e. terrorism by separatist-Islamist rebels in Chechnya and the broader North Caucasian region in the course of the first post-Soviet decades, and the more recent phenomenon of transnationalised, but home-grown, Islamist terrorism inspired by ‘global jihad’)? How specific are they, compared to typologically similar varieties of terrorism elsewhere? How does the rise and fall of terrorism in post-Soviet Russia relate to the factors of sociopolitical and socio-economic transition, regime type, functionality and legitimacy of state power, public perceptions and transnationalisation, in general and as compared to terrorism in the Russian Empire? How can very low levels of domestic terrorism during the Soviet period be explained? Finally, does history teach us anything? Can any lessons be gleaned from almost three decades of the more recent, contemporary history of terrorism in post-Soviet Russia? Have they been? If so, do they apply to Russia alone or more generally? These are just some of the questions that the angle taken in this volume raises in relation to Russia and that require both its main historical periods of terrorist activity to be addressed.

Chapter 8 returns to state and opposition contestation between national election cycles. It describes how the regime uses the advantages described in the formal model in Chapter 3 to respond to different electoral contexts, sometimes allowing the opposition to compete and banning them in other cases. In response, the opposition continues to innovate its strategies to generate new information about regime manipulation and the lack of electoral accountability. This process creates a perpetual campaign as the regime and opposition clash over elections at every level of the political system and between elections to shape information environments. The regime is forced to be nimble as it seeks to limit the diffusion of successful opposition strategies and avoid having to reveal new information in national elections. The focus on the Russian case describes regime success in 2016 and 2018 when it engineered victories without provoking protest. It also demonstrates that these efforts moved the regime incrementally in an autocratic direction, generating new political tensions and opposition opportunities. Victory did not end the potential for a breakthrough in the next election.

This chapter places recent events in the context of the theoretic framework. In 2024, President Putin and his government face the same challenge that it faced in 2008. Constitutional term limits mandate that Putin leave office, prompting broad speculation about its effect on the 2021 parliamentary elections and the presidential race. Consistent with the formal model, the regime banned the opposition in Moscow’s 2019 municipal elections and the opposition unified to send a protest signal. Popular response kicked off some of the largest protests in recent years. In response, the Kremlin increased the use of repression against protesters, a move that provided new information about the regime type. Voters carried the protest into the voting booth and sent a strong signal in support of opposition candidates. In addition, the Kremlin moved to manage the next national election cycle by instituting signification constitutional reform and launching new social welfare programs. The final section of the chapter highlights the contributions of the study for comparative politics and Russia regional studies.

When the USSR dissolved and Russia became a new independent country, it “lost’ its empire of centuries and its identity as the central dominant core of that empire. A few leaders and intellectuals promoted the development of a New Russia – democratic and globally oriented – but many retained the imperialist ambitions, requiring rebuilding of the empire in a new form. This view in the end won the day, especially under President Putin since 2000, although it did not mean “Back to the USSR” (pace Beatles), rather the use of diplomatic, economic, and in the last resort military instruments to maintain dominance over its old sphere of influence – the “near-abroad” in Moscow’s terminology. Its near monopoly over energy supplies and transport routes in the region was the most powerful tool, but softer efforts to propose new forms of united cooperation on economic and military fronts were also important – the Eurasian Economic Union was offered as an alternative to the EU. The invasions of Georgia then Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas gave mixed results as it encourage these two to move Westward even faster.

‘1989’ marked the start of an era of Westernization and liberalization. The disillusionment with this politics of convergence began in Russia in the mid-1990s, and then reached Eastern Europe a decade later. The economic crisis of 2008 broke faith in the superiority of the Western model, whilst accession to the European Union removed the political conditionality that had previously disciplined local politics. Powerful illiberal movements, in alliance with populist authoritarians in the West, challenged the naturalisation of liberalisation. The migration of their populations westwards and the ‘migrant crisis’ from 2015 sparked fantasies of demographic catastrophe. Against this background, such movements presented the East as the ‘true Europe’, defending its whiteness, Christianity, and heterosexuality against extra-European immigrants and a decadent West. They looked to new alliances with authoritarian and populists in China, Turkey, and the United States too. In so doing such populists reimagined their region’s place beyond Western-style politics, EU conditionality, and a Euro-Atlantic space. There was significant resistance though: EU officials, local centrist parties, and civic mobilizations continued to embrace 1989 as a symbol of unfulfilled hopes of democratic transformation.

The chapter identifies warnings within the EU foreign policy system related to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and examines the reasons for the differentiated impact among EU decision-makers. The Ukraine case was a strategic surprise to the overwhelming majority of EU policy-makers and posed significant diagnostic problems, but senior ministers within the system were warning their peers on the basis of previous cases, historical analogies, expert knowledge and recent indications of changed Russian intent. However, the persuasiveness of the few and late warnings suffered, first of all, from distraction by external crises coupled with limited bandwidth in the EU, shortages in relevant and reliable intelligence, high resistance against divergent policy predispositions of the warning and, finally, significant suspicions of national biases against key warning sources. The supranational part of the system was almost completely blindsided to geopolitical risk, while the newly established EEAS was partly unable and partly unwilling to persuade the Commission. It is fair to say that the system as a whole acted as an impediment to having a holistic discussion of warning as part of foreign policy discourse.

The book opens with two historical scenes, separated in time by nearly a thousand years. In the first, Vladimir Putin makes a speech in front of a new sixty-foot monument of Saint Vladimir the Great, the baptizer of Rus. Looking into the television camera, the president retells the myth of Christian origins of Russian civilization—a sacred story that was first written down in the early twelfth century by the clerical authors of the Rus Primary Chronicle (Повесть временных лет). In the second scene, readers are transported to eleventh-century Constantinople, where the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch are celebrating the Feast of Saints Constantine and Helena. They lead a liturgical procession of thousands across the city, and along the route the clergy ritually retell the story of the conversion of the Roman Empire. There follows a brief narrative history of how Byzantine church books were translated and transported into late tenth-century Kiev. The chapter concludes with the principal argument of the book: that the myth of Saint Vladimir and his kin recorded in the Rus Primary Chronicle has its source in the liturgical services of the Byzantine Empire.