The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen east. The Mongol invasion had left a powerful mark on...
For the majority of ordinary Russians, especially for those of a certain age who identified themselves as ‘Soviet’, the 1990s were little short of a catastrophe. They lost everything: a familiar way o...
As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected
These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The populists, who invested much of themselves in their c...
Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the...