Following the crisis in Ukraine, the Putin regime made political choices that will determine Russia's development for years to come. This cutting edge Pivot makes a key contribution to the debate on Russia's development and traces emerging trends in various spheres of Russian life, from the economy and foreign policy, to society and ideology.

Using polling data, news stories, government reports, and interviews, Nadia M. Diuk shows how the next generation of leaders in shaping three of the most important countries in the former Soviet Union.

Following his re-election on 18 March 2018, by a respectable but not wholly earned margin of victory, Vladimir Putin will embark on what will, under present constitutional arrangements, be his final six-year term in office. Putin’s Russia is ruled by an opaque and shifting power structure centred on the Kremlin. It is now devoid of authoritative institutions beyond that framework that would enable Russia to develop into a fully functional or accountable state. The main objective of the incumbent regime is to protect its hold on power. It will therefore continue, between now and 2024, to follow the three main policy guidelines set by Putin in 2012: to do without significant structural economic reforms because of the political risks attached to them; to control the population; and to pursue ‘great power’ ambitions.Notwithstanding some modest economic recovery latterly, all indications are that economic performance will be mediocre at best in the coming years. A context of ‘neo-stagnation’ is anticipated. The domestic interests of the population at large will continue to take second place to the security and military expenditure favoured by the leadership. Managing the relationship between the regions and the federal centre will take imagination and care.The ‘vertical of power’ of Putin’s vision is not the coherent structure that its name suggests. Shifting ‘understandings’ of what is permitted or required determine patterns of behaviour, not clear laws or independent courts. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, operates at the heart of the system – at times in rivalry with other agencies – both as a disparate security collective and as a group with its own interests in fleecing the public. Corruption is inherent in the Putinist order of things. The natural pathology of these factors is for repression and extortion to continue to rise.As 2024 approaches, the question of who or what will replace Putin will come increasingly to the fore. There is already a sense that Russia is entering a post-Putin era. The vote for him on 18 March is one of accepting the inevitable, not a personal triumph. There is no organized group around him to manage an eventual replacement, or to be ready to consider what his successor’s (or successors’) objectives should be.Putin’s abiding commitment to Russia’s right to be a great power, dominant over its neighbours, was once more made plain in his ‘state of the nation’ address to the Federal Assembly on 1 March, along with the distortions that go with it. The use, just two weeks before the presidential election, of a military-grade nerve agent to poison a former GRU officer and his daughter in the UK city of Salisbury has reinforced the case for greater vigilance as to the real nature of the present Kremlin.The West should pay close attention to the Kremlin’s human rights record over the next several years, and the way it fits with Russia’s existing international obligations. The exercise of justice is a basic obligation of all states, and a clear indicator of a country’s future development. Putin’s Kremlin is not the whole of Russia: the Russian people will to an important degree judge the countries of the West by their moral record in considering what may be good for Russia in due course.

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Russia 2025 offers a compelling insight into Russia's future by exploring thematic scenarios ranging from politics to demographics. The widening rift between a modernizing, post-Communist society and a paternalistic government will ultimately shape developments in the coming years and will impact on state-society and Center-periphery relations.

In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and enjoyed one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever seen, claiming ownership of some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires.

Is America in a new Cold War with Russia? How does a new Cold War affect the safety and security of the United States? Does Vladimir Putin really want to destabilize the West? What should Donald Trump and America’s allies do? America is in a new Cold War with Russia even more dangerous than the one the world barely survived in the twentieth century. The Soviet Union is gone, but the two nuclear superpowers are again locked in political and military confrontations, now from Ukraine to Syria. All of this is exacerbated by Washington’s war-like demonizing of the Kremlin leadership and by Russiagate’s unprecedented allegations. US mainstream media accounts are highly selective and seriously misleading. American “disinformation,” not only Russian, is a growing peril. In War With Russia?, Stephen F. Cohen—the widely acclaimed historian of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia—gives readers a very different, dissenting narrative of this more dangerous new Cold War from its origins in the 1990s, the actual role of Vladimir Putin, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis to Donald Trump’s election and today’s unprecedented Russiagate allegations. Topics include: Distorting Russia US Follies and Media Malpractices 2016 The Obama Administration Escalates Military Confrontation With Russia Was Putin’s Syria Withdrawal Really A “Surprise”? Trump vs. Triumphalism Has Washington Gone Rogue? Blaming Brexit on Putin and Voters Washington Warmongers, Moscow Prepares Trump Could End the New Cold War The Real Enemies of US Security Kremlin-Baiting President Trump Neo-McCarthyism Is Now Politically Correct Terrorism and Russiagate Cold-War News Not “Fit to Print” Has NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer? Why Russians Think America Is Attacking Them How Washington Provoked—and Perhaps Lost—a New Nuclear-Arms Race Russia Endorses Putin, The US and UK Condemn Him (Again) Russophobia Sanction Mania Cohen’s views have made him, it is said, “America’s most controversial Russia expert.” Some say this to denounce him, others to laud him as a bold, highly informed critic of US policies and the dangers they have helped to create. War With Russia? gives readers a chance to decide for themselves who is right: are we living, as Cohen argues, in a time of unprecedented perils at home and abroad?