Galtieri, Lukashenka, and Putin are some of the dictators whose untrammelled personal power has been seen as typical of the dog-eat-dog nature of leadership in authoritarian political systems. This book provides an innovative argument that, rather than being characterised by permanent insecurity, fear, and arbitrariness, the leadership of dictatorships is actually governed by a series of rules. The rules are identified, and their operation is shown in a range of different types of authoritarian regime. The operation of the rules is explained in ten different countries across five different regime types: the Soviet Union and China as communist single party regimes; Argentina, Brazil, and Chile as military regimes; electoral authoritarian Malaysia and Mexico; personalist dictatorships in Belarus and Russia; and the Gulf monarchies. Through close analysis of the way leadership functions in these different countries, the book shows how the rules have worked in different institutional settings. It also shows how the power distribution in authoritarian oligarchies is related to the rules. The book transforms our understanding of how authoritarian systems work.

A diverse group of international scholars provides unique perspectives on contemporary global crises and their intersection with the media of public communication. Contributors draw upon a range of compelling theoretical frameworks and methodologies, situating each chapter in the wider literature within a nuanced and complex historical context.

Personalist leaders, such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko or Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, are increasingly prominent players in the international landscape; their motivations and policies, however, are poorly understood. The regimes they lead are difficult to examine, mostly because of their most defining feature-an inordinate concentration of power in the hands of one single individual. Yet, personalist leaders do not rule alone, even if they do not always govern through institutional channels. How do personalist regimes really work? How do their rulers acquire and maintain personal control? How does contemporary personal rule differ from how it was practised during the Cold War? These are the key questions addressed in Personalism and Personalist Regimes, which offers a systematic examination of the logic of personalism, or personalist rule, tackling comprehensively the study of personalist leaders and personalist regimes. The book is underpinned by a theoretical framework that combines historical and comparative analyses, brought forward through a series of detailed country studies authored by a distinguished group of comparativists and area studies experts. The book also revisits, and builds upon, Sultanistic Regimes, the seminal study by H.E. Chehabi and Juan Linz. In contrast to Sultanistic Regimes that studied sultanism-an extreme form of personalism-Personalism and Personalist Regimes examines personal rule on its full continuum, from Turkey under Erdo?an or Venezuela under Maduro, to Turkmenistan under Berdimuhamedov or Libya under Gaddafi. Because personalism, or personal rule, can be present across all regimes, the book also includes several studies of personalism and institutions in party dictatorships, China or Cuba amongst others.

This book is a study of the relationship between revolution and terror. Historically many have claimed that revolution inevitably devolves into terror, best reflected in the way in which after coming to power the revolutionary elite turns on itself, and one section of it uses terrorist means to eliminate another section. This thesis originally stemmed from the French revolution but has more recently also been applied to the Russian and the Chinese revolutions. Graeme Gill argues that in order to understand the relationship between revolution and terror, it is necessary to distinguish between different types of terror. There are three such types: revolutionary terror, in which the aim is to destroy enemies and thereby consolidate the regime; transformational terror, designed to drive the politico-socio-economic transformation of society that is the purpose of the 'great' revolutions; and inverted terror, which is when terror is turned against part of the elite and regime more broadly. The analysis explains how these different types of terror are related to the revolutionary seizure of power, showing that revolutionary and transformational terror are organically connected to revolution while for inverted terror the connection is mediated through the leader. The argument is prosecuted through detailed analysis of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. The study ends by assessing the contemporary salience of the lessons of the great revolutions in the light of the low level of violence in the negotiated revolutions of 1989.

This second edition of the highly respected Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society both provides a broad overview of the area and highlights cutting-edge research into the country. Through balanced theoretical and empirical investigation, each chapter examines both the Russian experience and the existing literature, identifies and exemplifies research trends, and highlights the richness of experience, history, and continued challenges inherent to this enduringly fascinating and shifting polity. Politically, economically, and socially, Russia has one of the most interesting development trajectories of any major country. This Handbook answers questions about democratic transition, the relationship between the market and democracy, stability and authoritarian politics, the development of civil society, the role of crime and corruption, the development of a market economy, and Russia’s likely place in the emerging new world order. Providing a comprehensive resource for scholars, students, and policy makers alike, this book is an essential contribution to the study of Russian studies/politics, Eastern European studies/politics, and International Relations.

Sukhanov stood at the centre of the Russian revolution as a founding member and ideologist of the Petrograd Soviet and as fearless editor of the leading opposition newspaper. His seven-volume eyewitness memoir of the major events of the Russian revolution is peopled by such leading figures as Lenin, Trotsky, Martov, Chernov, Tsereteli and many more. In the 1920s he stood out in courageous opposition to those of his fellow economists who prepared the Communist Party for Stalin's brutal collectivization. Found guilty at the farcical Menshevik show-trial of 1931 and subsequently victim of a trumped-up charge of spying for Germany, he was shot in 1940 and only rehabilitated in 1992. His fate epitomizes the tragedy of those Russian intellectuals who sought an accommodation with the Communist dictatorship and were destroyed by it.

A leading journalist and public intellectual explains the long, disturbing history behind the American Right’s embrace of foreign dictators, from Kaiser Wilhelm and Mussolini to Putin and Orban. Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? Why is Ron DeSantis drawing from Victor Orbán’s illiberal politics for his own policies as governor of Florida—a single American state that has more than twice the population of Orbán’s entire nation, Hungary? In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators—though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment—is not a new phenomenon. It dates to the First World War, when some conservatives, enthralled with Kaiser Wilhelm II, openly rooted for him to defeat the forces of democracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, this affinity became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American admirers. Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, while some conservatives wrote apologias for the Third Reich and for apartheid South Africa. The habit of mind is not really about foreign policy, however. As Heilbrunn argues, the Right is drawn to what it perceives as the impressive strength of foreign dictators, precisely because it sees them as models of how to fight against liberalism and progressivism domestically. America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion—or what one might call the “illiberal imagination”—that has animated conservative politics for a century now. Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travelers in America. Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is an unignorable tradition within modern American conservatism—and what it means for us today.