Tomila Lankina

I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to Professors Stephen Hanson, Egor Lazarev, Bryn Rosenfeld, and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova for taking the time to read the book carefully and for offering their thoughtful comments and critique. I am also grateful to the editors of Nationalities Papers for providing a forum for and facilitating the symposium.

The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System. By Yaacov Ro’i. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. 424p. $75.00 cloth. - Volume 21 Issue 4

Although Russian studies is a thriving field, there are significant gaps in our knowledge of Russian politics and society. One of the most significant blind spots is how Russian support for the war remains apparently robust, despite the atrocities inflicted on Ukraine and the tenuous justifications that have been offered for war. I draw on my own research to make sense of social responses to autocracy and the war. Specifically, I highlight the deep and intractable social inequalities within Russia that date back to the tzarist times and that the communist project never succeeded in obliterating. The social divides help explain why there has been no mass opposition to autocracy and the war.

This essay reflects upon the consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine on the sub-field of Russian studies in political science. I argue that the war has exposed some blind spots in our knowledge. Notably, it has left us struggling to understand the historically deprived communities in Russia whose values, sentiments, and vulnerabilities may be indirect buttresses to both support for Putin and the war. I discuss two key issues in the sub-field: (1) the elite-centered approaches in research in mainstream work on Russia, not least due to data availability preoccupations; and (2) the paucity of inter-disciplinary perspectives, particularly the reluctance of mainstream studies to cast their nets into history and sociology. Disciplinary pressures – the credibility revolution – complicate a historically sensitive revision of long-internalized assumptions. I draw on my recent work on the historical underpinnings of social structure and its implications for civil society, protest, and support for democracy in Russia.

We contribute to research on the democratic role of middle classes. Our paper distinguishes between middle classes emerging autonomously during gradual capitalist development and those fabricated rapidly as part of state-led modernization. To make the case for a conceptual distinction between these groups within one national setting, we employ author-assembled historical district data, survey, and archival materials for pre-Revolutionary Russia and its feudal estates. Our analysis reveals that the bourgeois estate ofmeshchanecovaries with post-communist democratic competitiveness and media freedoms, our proxies of regional democratic variations. We propose two causal pathways explaining the puzzling persistence of social structure despite the Bolsheviks’ leveling ideology and post-communist autocratic consolidation: (a) processes at the juncture of familial channels of human capital transmission and the revolutionaries’ modernization drive and (b) entrepreneurial value transmission outside of state policy. Our findings help refine recent work on political regime orientations of public-sector-dependent societies subjected to authoritarian modernization.

A growing literature explores the causes and consequences of dramatic political protests in autocracies. Yet, we know comparatively little about other forms of protests in these regimes. The Lankina Russian Protest-Event Dataset (LAruPED) facilitates the investigation of protest in Russia, a classic example of an electoral authoritarian regime. The data, which are human-coded, identify, in wave one, protests across Russia from March 2007 until 2016. Unlike other datasets, which focus on political protests, LAruPED covers a wide range of social and economic protests and imposes no limitations on the minimum number of protesters involved in events as a prerequisite for inclusion in the dataset. We introduce LAruPED and discuss how it differs from other data. We also present examples from work that leverages the dataset to show how the data could be used to explore questions of authoritarian politics, highlighting variation in the type of suppressed protests in electoral autocracies.

We analyse Russian state media’s framing of the Euromaidan protests using a novel Russian-language electronic content-analysis dictionary and method that we have developed ourselves. We find that around the time of Crimea’s annexation, the Kremlin-controlled media projected media narratives of protests as chaos and disorder, using legalistic jargon about the status of ethnic Russians and federalisation, only to abandon this strategy by the end of April 2014. The shift in media narratives corresponding to the outbreak of violence in the Donbas region gives credence to arguments about Putin’s strategic, interests-driven foreign policy, while adding nuance to those that highlight the role of norms and values.

Does electoral fraud encourage post-electoral protests? To explore the likelihood that citizens would pick up on electoral irregularities perpetrated in their region and engage in post-electoral protest we analyse regional protest event data and voting results for 95,415 precincts in Russia's 2012 presidential elections. We find that regional fraud is associated with post-electoral sub-national protests. Our analysis has important theoretical and policy implications. Protests that not only target specific issues like fraud, but show awareness of where it had been perpetrated can be much more effective than those where blame attribution is vague and generic.

We extend the “fraud forensics” research to systematically explain precinct-level and regional variations in electoral manipulations in Russia’s March 2012 presidential election. Parametric last-digit frequency tests (a multivariate extension of last-digit tests) are employed to analyze fraud heterogeneity during the vote count stage. We also utilize author-assembled data harvested from the election monitoring non-governmental organization Golos’s regional reports of misconduct to explore the co-variance of last-digit fraud with other irregularities extending beyond the falsification of electoral records. We find that while higher regional education levels positively correlate with exposure of electoral malpractice, an educated populace may also incentivize regional officials to channel misconduct toward election-day fraud – perhaps because pre-electoral manipulations would be more visible to the public than tampering with ballots, and thus, more vulnerable to exposure. Furthermore, last-digit fraud is associated with (a) fake turnout counts; (b) fake votes disproportionally benefitting Putin; and (c) vote “re-distribution” whereby votes cast for some candidates are systematically miscounted. We also find that citizen reports of election-day misconduct are positively correlated with our region-specific last-digit fraud measures. The results indicate that reports by independent observers of sub-national electoral irregularities could be employed as reasonably reliable indicators of fraud, and could be utilized alongside other data to ascertain the incidence of misconduct in Russia and other settings.

There is a rich body of theorizing on the diffusion of democracy across space and time. There is also an emerging scholarship on authoritarian diffusion. The dynamics of the interaction between external democratic and autocratic diffusion processes and their effects on national and sub-national political regime outcomes have received scant attention in the literature. Do democratic diffusion processes help counter external authoritarian influences? And, in contexts where external diffusion of democratic influences is weak, do we observe greater susceptibility to diffusion from regional autocracies that might in turn reinforce authoritarian practices and institutions in “recipient” states? To address these questions, we perform analysis of data from two original under-utilized data sets—a data set on the European Union (EU) aid to Russia’s regions and a data set with statistics on trade among post-Soviet states. We find that EU aid has the effect of countering external authoritarian influences that work through Soviet-era inter-regional economic ties.