Introduction to the Fifteenth Anniversary Issue

Abstract

Demokratizatsiya is in constant change, just like the region it studies. Founded by undergraduate students in a dorm room with the help of three visionary deans at American University (AU), it quickly became a normal, professional publication. It began as a biyearly publication that soon thereafter expanded to a quarterly. After two years on its own but in partnership with AU, Moscow State University, the International Freedom Foundation and later the American Foreign Policy Council, the journal became part of Heldref Publications--created by scholars from the American Political Science Association concerned about the survival of worthy scholarly journals. After years with the same familiar look, Demokratizatsiya recently changed its format to make it more suitable for newsstands and bookstores. It fluctuates between hard scholarship and policy-relevant scholarship, reflecting the five "stakeholder" groups that shaped it: Western Sovietologists, NIS scholars, Western policymakers, NIS policymakers, and scholars from other disciplines coming in contact with the NIS. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal experts, economists, and policymakers make the journal interdisciplinary. Our online edition (through Metapress) has been more successful than anticipated--even surpassing the print version. The students who were instrumental in founding the journal--Kelly Adams, Vasilios Fotopoulos, Ruth Pojman, David Bain, Paula Orlikowski, Frederick Williams, Chris Dwyer, and Steve Cruty (later joined by Peter Serenyi, Grant Benson, Natalia Melnyczuk, Laurence Olson, Rangarajan Soundararajan, John Knab, Chris Corpora, Shinjinee Sen, Dmitri Iudine, Birgit Brauer, Svetlana Bagaudinova, Liesl Heeter, Kelly McKenna, Brian Simon, Craig Coulter, James Stevens, Ross Phelps, Timothy Scott, and Glenn Bryant, among others)--paid the price of their youthful indiscretion by moving on to bigger and better NIS-related katorga (hard labor). Five years ago I also mentioned the instability of cadres in the journal, as its editors are highly successful and mobile types who get big appointments and have to rotate out of their editorial responsibilities. Those of us familiar with the business world see this as normalno (as the Russians see their society becoming, according to Richard Rose in this issue). The journal practices what it preaches, subject to the classic formula of democracy: predictable publication every three months, but unpredictable outcomes! Because it is blind peer reviewed and its editorial leadership decentralized, the journal can essentially run itself. But there is also room for editorial leadership and individual editors nonetheless have left their indelible marks, which proved fortuitous because they are outstanding scholars who predicted defining trends very early. If there is one expert who can say "I told you so," it is our former executive editor J. Michael Waller, whose articles on the KGB since 1992 predicted to a tee the phenomenon we now call Putinism. So can Louise Shelley and her focus on corruption and organized crime. Nikolai Zlobin, Michael McFaul, Sally Stoecker, Vladimir Brovkin, and Fiona Hill also brought numerous and highly diverse insights of their own and through the networks of scholars they invited to write for the journal. Marshall Goldman's pioneering work on oil and gas politics is proving no less relevant for today, as is Christopher Marsh's extrapolations on the transition in China and Henry Hale's outstanding analyses of party-state structure. Demokratizatsiya is a journal of academic and policy Cassandras. Originally provoking unease among some established Sovietologists (one even vowed to "smash" us back in 1992), the journal today is published in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and its avant-garde position today is the mainstream--not least because events proved us right, but also because the then-emerging and maverick scholars that formed the journal have gradually taken over the academy. …