Facebook Live: What Defines Russian Authoritarianism?

On Thursday, May 21 from 1:30pm-2:00pm, the Kennan Institute held Facebook Live featuring a conversation between Andrea Kendall-Taylor and William Pomeranz. They discussed what defines Russian authoritarianism and how it affects Russia’s foreign policy and relations with the West.

This conversation was the second in an occasional Kennan Institute series featuring discussions with leading experts and thinkers on Russia and Eurasia.

View the stream on our Facebook Page HERE.

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Selected Quotes

Andrea Kendall-Taylor

"When you look at Russia in a comparative perspective […] you see that the regime that Putin has created over the last 20 years is really not so different than many highly personalized authoritarian regimes.”

"First and foremost, in Russia, power is concentrated in the hand of an individual and that is Mr. Vladimir Putin; it’s not a consensus-based system like you see in some other authoritarian regimes [...] In Russia, on all decisions of consequence, Putin is the primary decider.”

"It used to be that building a repressive capability required tremendous amounts of resources, building up a whole cadre of security actors who are loyal and able to carry out repression, but now […] surveillance and some of the digital repression is changing that.”

William Pomeranz

"Russia has been playing the sovereignty card for centuries, as it were, but what I think was unexpected was the decision both by the United States and the United Kingdom, who had done nothing but benefit from globalization and greater integration, to both play the sovereignty card at the same time as well [...] Once you're emphasizing sovereignty, you're playing on Vladimir Putin's playing field."

"There only have been two examples, and they weren’t very long, where an elected legislature challenged […] the autocratic power of the leader, and that was with the Duma […] and the period between 1991 and 2000 […] Those are really the only two times in Russia where a leader really felt themselves constrained."