Demokratizatsiya最新文献

{"title":"Municipal Reform in the Russian Federation and Putin's \"Electoral Vertical\"","authors":"C. Ross","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.2.191-208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.2.191-208","url":null,"abstract":"Since President Putin came to power in 2000 we have witnessed a radical assault on the principles and practices of federalism. More recently, Putin has turned his attention to politics at the subregional level. In October 2003 a new federal law, \"On the Principles of Local Self Government in the Russian Federation\" (hereafter, the 2003 Law), was adopted that seriously compromises local government autonomy.1 After discussing the major features of the 2003 Law and the problems of its implementation, this article examines the most recent round of municipal elections, which took place in 2004 and 2005. Municipal elections in many federal subjects have been far from free and fair. State control over local electoral commissions and the courts have dealt a serious blow to the development of grassroots democracy in Russia. The consolidation of democracy has also been undermined by a series of laws on elections and parties that Putin adopted in the wake of the Beslan hostage crisis in September 2004. These new laws, ostensibly designed to strengthen Russia's party system, have, in practice, allowed United Russia to consolidate its hold over regional and local assemblies.Federalism and Local Government in the Russian FederationIn theory, local governments in Russia operate outside the formal state hierarchy. Article 12 of the Russian Constitution states that, \"In the Russian Federation local self-government is recognized and guaranteed. Within the limits of its powers local self-government is independent. Bodies of local self-government do not form part of the system of bodies of state power.\" However, municipalities have, in practice, been treated as a \"third tier\" of state power, subordinate to regional and federal administrations.2Municipal government in Russia also operates within a quasi-federal system epitomized by high levels of constitutional and political asymmetry. Thus, to fully understand local level politics, the peculiarities of the Russian federal system, and in particular the massive powers that were ceded to the federal subjects in the 1990s need to be taken into account. Between 1994 and 1998 Yeltsin signed forty-six bilateral treaties with federal subjects that granted the signatories a number of extraconstitutional powers, including the right to develop their own forms of local government. By the end of the Yeltsin era, a highly politicized form of \"contract\" federalism had replaced constitutional federalism. \"The result,\" Campbell stresses, \"was not decentralisation but 'autonomisation' . . . whereby the state was held together by a loose parade of treaties bargained between the centre and the individual regions.\"3Daniel Elazar argues that local governments in federal systems are often able to gain \"a substantial measure of entrenched political power\" by capitalizing on \"the spirit of noncentralisation-the spirit of federalism.\"4 However, in Russia's quasi-federal system, regional elites have been able to subjugate local level bodies w","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"58 6 1","pages":"191-208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89553426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gorbachev, Lenin, and the Break with Leninism","authors":"Archie Brown","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.2.230-244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.2.230-244","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The author examines the paradox of Mikhail Gorbachev's esteem for Lenin in combination with his growing rejection of Leninism. While Gorbachev still held the office of general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, he embraced ideas fundamentally at odds with those of the Soviet Union's principal architect. The focus of Western writers on Gorbachev's 1987 book, Perestroika.\" New Thinking for Our Country and the World, as a major source has been simplistic and misleading, obscuring the radicalization of Gorbachev's political ideas from 1988 onward. Drawing, inter alia, on previously unused archival documents, the author demonstrates how Gorbachev's views moved closer to those of Eduard Bernstein, a democratic socialist thinker whom Lenin despised, than to Leninism. Given the institutional power Gorbachev wielded until late in the perestroika period, his embrace of concepts radically at odds with Leninism was of critical importance, opening doors which had remained firmly closed for decades. Keywords: Bernstein, Bolshevik, command-administrative system, democratization, Gorbachev, Lenin, Leninism, perestroika, pluralism, socialism In a highly authoritarian political system, with great power vested in the office at the top of the political hierarchy, the values, policy preferences, and personality of the holder of that office are liable to make a bigger difference to major policy outcomes than the personality, values, and preferences of the head of government within a democracy. The constraints on the latter will be far greater--not only from members of his or her party, but also from opposition parties, the legislature, the judiciary, organized interests, and public opinion, to name the most obvious. That is not to say, however, that the power of the top leader in an authoritarian system is entirely unconstrained. If the authoritarian system is a) highly institutionalized and b) highly ideologized, then there are likely to be quite serious obstacles in the path of major innovation of even the topmost leader. In particular, it will be very risky for him (I do not add \"or her,\" for male leadership is ubiquitous in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes) to attempt to change the basic tenets of the system's legitimating ideology or its institutional norms. These factors all apply to the case of Mikhail Gorbachev and the transformation of the Soviet system. When Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, he attained the office which commanded greater institutional resources than any other within the country. Yet this was in a thoroughly consolidated authoritarian regime--in the classification of Linz and Stepan an example of \"post-totalitarianism\" (1)--in which the top leader was accorded great authority provided he played by the rules of the game. There was an important precedent in the post-Stalin Soviet Union illustrating the potential vulnerability of even the supreme leader. Although Ni","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"83 1","pages":"230-244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80337086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Revolution of the Mind","authors":"Yulia Malysheva","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.117-128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.117-128","url":null,"abstract":"propositions. But there are virtually none that describe in the contexts of history and culture the actual emergence of these ideas. As one scholar recently noted, the word “democracy” has (since 1945) generally been “a pretext for ideological endorsement rather than a term for a historically rooted process.” This is equally true of equality. While there is “plenty of work on equality,” another commentator observes, “there is precious little in the modern literature on the background to the idea that we humans are, fundamentally, one another’s equals.” The story of the emergence of modern democratic core values as a Western and global historical phenomenon before 1789 remains—in America, Europe, Africa, and Asia alike—a gigantic yawning gap. The risk in considering our core values as purely abstract concepts that do not require examination in their historical context, or imagining the French Revolution invented them, is that we then remain blind to how, why, and where these concepts first emerged amid conflict and controversy, and the means whereby they slowly advanced in the teeth of widespread opposition and eventually became first intellectually and then politically hegemonic. Not only scholars but also the general reading, debating, and voting public need some awareness of the tremendous difficulty, struggle, and cost involved in propagating our core ideas in the face of the long-dominant monarchical, aristocratic, and religious ideologies, privi-","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"15 1","pages":"117-128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69881674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Through an Orange-Colored Lens: Western Media, Constructed Imagery, and Color Revolutions","authors":"Andres Schipani-Aduriz","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.87-116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.87-116","url":null,"abstract":"\"Watch out . . . he's a foreign journalist.\"-From Tintin in the Land of Soviets1IntroductionIn June 2005, Ian Traynor, a foreign correspondent of the Manchester-based newspaper The Guardian, wrote a story claiming that \"from the Chinese frontier to the borders of the European Union, the vast post-Soviet space has been in the grip of revolutionary fervour over the past few years-a second wave of democratization after the 1989-91 revolutions symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall.\"2 He was referring to the \"bloodless,\"3 \"peaceful,\"4 \"electoral,\"5 \"democratic,\"6 or \"color revolutions\"7 that occurred in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively. Those popular upheavals were based on the October 2000 Serbian election, when democratic protests toppled Slobodan Miloevic's authoritarian regime.8After Serbia, the democratic upheavals in the former Soviet Union shared the common feature of being centered on fraudulent elections with an opposition supported by key circles in the West. As a result, protests varying in size broke out in all three post-Soviet countries. Following a period of uncertainty, the incumbent president either resigned from office and/or the election outcome was overturned, resulting in a member of the opposition becoming president.9 All these situations ended without bloodshed (although looting was visible in Kyrgyzstan), the challengers embraced nonviolent tactics, and the incumbents did not call on state-security forces to repress the protests. Not even the opposition leaders predicted the scale and duration of the street protests.10 As in the 1989-91 period when, like falling dominos, socialist governments fell to the forces of democratization, Western journalists ran to the East to offer their perceptions to the West.The media not only watched, they also played a crucial role11 in the years after the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, as rapid developments dramatically changed the status quo. Images of influential figures in the \"eastern bloc\"-Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Wal.esa, and Vaclav Havel-facing leaders from the \"West\"-Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II-were mingled with those of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Bucharest crowds that violently deposed Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu.12 In Moscow, an attempted coup by Soviet hard-liners failed in large part because the media was telling everyone around the globe what was happening with Gorbachev in Foros, while Yeltsin and putschists addressed a crowd from the top of a tank.13The perception of the world aligned along East-West lines was, arguably, simpler to understand-at least as defined by the Western press. Today, readers and viewers can know almost as much as they want about distant, formerly inaccessible places such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. However, the window on the world is now wider, but it can be disorderly and confusing to look through it. The dimension of these changes carries implications not only for jo","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"23 1","pages":"87-115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77354432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revolution Is Contagious","authors":"M. Kapusta","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.133-138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.133-138","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"15 1","pages":"133-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69881822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unparalleled Reforms: China's Rise, Russia's Fall, and the Interdependence of Transition","authors":"James W. Warhola","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-1767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-1767","url":null,"abstract":"Unparalleled Reforms: China's Rise, Russia's Fall, and the Interdependence of Transition, Christopher Marsh. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 189 pp. $75.00, cloth.Christopher Marsh's latest book, Unparalleled Reforms: China's Rise, Russia's Fall, and the Interdependence of Transition, is an ambitious attempt to both chronicle and account for the different paths of political and economic change taken by the People's Republic of China, beginning in 1978, and the USSR-turned-Russian Federation, beginning in the late 1980s. This book is an exercise in comparative politics in the very best sense: the author has selected two cases in which numerous similarities are juxtaposed with profound differences in national culture, history, policies, and results of policies. As such, the prospects for scholarly knowledge and understanding to be significantly expanded are very good. Marsh succeeds in a manner that is likely to spawn similar attempts to understand the efficacy of reform projects not only in Russia and China, but also in other geographically proximate countries (e.g., Central Asia and Mongolia).The value of the book is underscored by the paucity of works comparing reform in China and Russia, despite the fertility of intellectual soil from which meaningful, deeply informed comparison might usefully occur. This is especially so given the approach taken in Unparalleled Reforms, wherein the author undertakes his comparative analysis from the perspective of seeking to understand the manner and degree to which China and Russia's reform efforts were mutually interdependent. That paucity is traceable in large measure to the scarcity of North American scholars who have advanced research capability in both the Russian and Chinese languages, and who are deeply learned in those countries' cultures and histories and thoroughly familiar with contemporary scholarship on comparative political analysis. Fortunately for the scholarly community, Marsh possesses all of the above, and accordingly brings a wealth of insight to his readers. As such, Unparalleled Reforms appears destined for long-term noteworthiness in that it represents a truly pioneering effort, and for which the scholarly community will long remain indebted.Given the size of the topic and the book's length (less than 200 pages), it is remarkably insightful and concise. Although the bulk of the book's contribution is found, of course, in the seven substantive chapters, I found even the several-page preface to be succinctly insightful. By mentioning Foucault's concept of an \"archive\" of essentially distorted understandings of other cultures serving as a poor substitute for thoroughly grasping the underlying realities of those cultures, Marsh gives his readers a hint of the deep insights offered throughout Unparalleled Reforms. Marsh succeeds, in fact, in summarizing a broad array of scholarship in an engaging readable manner. Unparalleled Reforms calls not merely for a quick read, but close study by a","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"22 1","pages":"153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82472863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The diffusion of Revolutions. A Comparison of regime turnovers in 5 Countries","authors":"M. Fenger","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.5-28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.5-28","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The recent revolutions or near-revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine share the following characteristics: stolen elections triggered them, there were massive, nonviolent demonstrations, and the opposition united behind a single, often charismatic, leader. This article combines two theoretical perspectives on the recent revolutions in southeast Europe and Central Asia: a state failure perspective that focuses on the domestic characteristics that helps explain these events, and a diffusion perspective that focuses on the interrelatedness between these events by means of the interchange of financial resources, activists, and knowledge. It concludes that foreign interventions aimed at the democratization of unstable states might facilitate regime change by democratic or undemocratic means, but it is never a sufficient condition for regime change. Keywords: democratization, policy diffusion, revolutions, state failure Introduction The latest wave of revolutions in southeast Europe and Central Asia illustrates the vulnerability of oppressive, authoritarian, and nondemocratic regimes. This wave started in Serbia in 2000, and ended in Kyrgyzstan in early 2005. (1) Almost all of these revolutions share the following characteristics: stolen elections triggered them, there were massive, nonviolent demonstrations, and the opposition united behind a single, often charismatic, leader. Revolutions are often linked to the concept of failing states. However, various sources cite the role of foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that help build and sustain a coalition of opposition parties, train volunteers in campaigning and monitoring election results, and even formulate and implement strategies to overthrow the regime. (2) Singh even speaks of franchised revolutions. (3) This article combines two theoretical perspectives on the recent revolutions in southeast Europe and Central Asia: a state failure perspective that focuses on the domestic characteristics that helps explain these events and a diffusion perspective that focuses on the interrelatedness between these events by means of the interchange of financial resources, activists, and knowledge. This article contributes to the explanatory and--perhaps more important--predictive power of the state failure approach by taking into account the deliberate strategies of foreign actors to overthrow regimes. This analysis is based on a review of existing literature and databases, except for the Moldovan case, which is based on a series of interviews from March 2005. The literature on revolutions is elaborate and does not provide a consensus on how to define a revolution. I follow Goodwin, (4) who defines a revolution as any and all instances in which a state or government is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional, or violent manner. However, whether an event is labeled a revolution is not a matter of a simple dichotomy.","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"30 1","pages":"5-28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89381040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Orange People: A Brief History of Transnational Liberation Networks in East Central Europe","authors":"Fredo Arias-King","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.29-72","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.29-72","url":null,"abstract":"\"We have underestimated completely the processes taking place in Poland, Hungary and especially recently in East Germany, and their effect and influence on our society.\"1-Milos JakesDeposed Czechoslovak communist leaderNovember 25, 1989IntroductionThis article broadly traces a specific aspect of the transnational \"effect and influence\" (in Jake.'s words) of the processes of liberation in the past half-century in central and eastern Europe. It explores the origin of the transnational Orange networks, their interactions behind the Iron Curtain, their zenith in 1989 through 1991, reappearance in the partially reformed postcommunist space, and ends with their latest activities, before outlining a few generalizations in search of a theory for their origins and motivation. Undoubtedly, the contagion effect from abroad is but one in the constellation of factors (mostly domestic) that make these liberations possible.2 And within this factor, the transnational Orange networks are also but one element. This article will focus on this specific aspect-the main Orange people that transcended borders to reach out to other Orange people.Because the numerous individuals and groups that have organized to overthrow communist and neocommunist regimes have a multiplicity of ideologies and goals-from liberal to patriotic to anarchist to religious to social-democratic to reformed-communist to simply outraged citizens-for simplicity, and despite its recent discomfiture, the label \"Orange\" to describe them collectively is used for this article. Besides Ukraine's event in late 2004, orange has been used by several opposition forces in the region, the most evident being Poland's \"Orange Alternative\" as well as Hungary's \"Orange Appeal\" and the journal Magyar narancs (Hungarian Orange).Similarly, because the regimes targeted by the Orange people also span different categorizations- from communist to pseudo-fascist to corrupt neocommunist to sultanistic to ultra-etatist to simply illiberal-in this article I also continue with an earlier hypothesis that the nature of such regimes cannot be easily defined by ideology or any well-constructed system of values. Their common denominator instead is a compulsion to engage in illiberal and antisocial behavior, perhaps carried over from a combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology and self-selection to and training in their respective nomenklatury. Not all Communist Party members engaged in antisocial behavior and some were quite constructive to the reform process and human rights (in fact, regime moderates who played key liberating roles are also defined as Orange people here). It is also true that, with few known exceptions, the key individuals conforming the antisocial regimes were either communists or had actively participated in antisocial activities from within the apparat even after the liberalizing trends began. Such individuals change ideology and political orientations quite rapidly (the most common venue is from communist to","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"71 1","pages":"29-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76479171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Institutional Design of Russian Federalism: A Comparative Study of Three Republics; Tatarstan, Dagestan, and Chechnya","authors":"S. Kaloudıs","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.139-152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.139-152","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionOver the course of the past decade federalism has, for the most part, allowed Russia to temporarily stave off ethnically motivated separatism by granting varying levels of autonomy to the regions. The question follows as to why this has worked successfully in certain non-Russian areas, specifically the republics of Tatarstan and Dagestan, which have joined with Moscow under this federalist arrangement, while other ethnic groups and states, most notably the Chechens, have pushed for secession and violence. Moreover, is instability inherent to an ethnically diverse federation or can agreement on the breakdown of power be achieved that will pacify all parties involved?Following the resignation of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian rump state lost the coercive and persuasive ability to rule a centrally controlled empire. Instead, the Russian masses were bequeathed a decentralized nation devoid of a coherent national identity and ethos.1 As Daniel Kempton and others show, the collapse of the Soviet Union let loose \". . . the centrifugal forces of ethnic nationalism, religious animosity, and regional self-interest.\"2 Adding to the exacerbation of the already deep ethnic and economic cleavages present in Russian society was the political tug-of-war developing between President Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of the Russian Supreme Soviet, who possessed the legal authority to run the country. In his attempt to build internal alliances against this legislative body, Yeltsin brokered numerous deals with the constituent republics over the levels of autonomy they could acquire.3 At this time, he uttered the now infamous and subsequently disastrous statement to the republics, \"grab all the sovereignty you can.\"4 Between 1994 and 1998, the federal government signed forty-two power sharing treaties with forty-six of the eighty-nine regions.5 In many instances, the federal government ceded lucrative privileges within the economic and political arena to the local governors.The historical case studies within this article depict how interpersonal relations among the political elite played a key role in the development of asymmetry leading to either the occurrence or avoidance of conflict within Tatarstan, Dagestan, and Chechnya. Furthermore, by focusing on the erratic evolution of the institutional set up, the path discussed shows how political and economic incentives within a federalist framework can be used to incorporate all regions and republics into a unified state.6 The process denotes how the would-be disastrous remnants of asymmetry can be substantially reduced and replaced with political and economic motivators to incorporate the regions into the dominant regime.Federalism DefinedThe ripple effect set off by the attempts of the ethnic republics to assert greater sovereign control caused an ever-increasing move toward decentralization and confusion across the reigns of government. This process tested the limits of the new, however amb","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"87 1 1","pages":"139-151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74613926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Russia's Political Youths","authors":"M. Schwirtz","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.15.1.73-86","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.15.1.73-86","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Although most Russian youths are politically apathetic, a small cross section is engaged in political activity--mostly consisting of protest actions--in preparation for the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. Youth-based political and civic organizations can be defined generally by their support for, or opposition to, President Vladimir Putin and the party of power. Ideological differences between opposition youth organizations have prevented the formation of an effective civic movement. Putin's administration has employed a number of tactics, including the creation of the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi (Ours) to counteract anti-Kremlin youth groups such as Youth Yabloko, The National Bolshevik Party, and Oborona. Western nongovernmental organizations, along with youth alumni of the \"colored revolutions,\" have been helping Russian opposition youth to overcome these difficulties, much to the dismay of the Putin administration. Keywords: democracy assistance, elections, Orange Revolution, politics, youths ********** Russia's youths are preparing for battle. With the State Duma and presidential elections approaching, youth-based civic and political organizations, aided by Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and alumni of the so-called colored revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Serbia have been gearing up for a contest against the firmly entrenched United Russia Party (YeR) and the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been pumping millions of rubles into its own youth groups with the hope of thwarting a Ukrainian-style revolution. Enhanced focus on youths in Russia has come mainly in response to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Youth-based organizations have played an important role in the colored revolutions that have swept across the postcommunist space in the last five years. The knowledge of organizational techniques and movement management developed in Serbia by Otpor and a host of Western-based NGOs has infiltrated into Georgia and Ukraine, helping to fuel the rise of democratic culture if only in response to flagrant infringements on democratic principles. In Ukraine, organizations such as Pora and Znayu not only provided the passion and sense of purpose that contributed to the spirit of the Orange Revolution, they also played a major role in mobilizing the Ukrainian people to challenge the authorities. Following their success, activist youths from Ukraine have joined their colleagues from Georgia and Serbia, along with a number of Western-based NGOs, in exporting organizational knowledge and democratic participation to other countries in the former Soviet Union. Many of these organizations have focused on Russia as a small number of youth-ased political and civic organizations prepare for parliamentary elections in 2007 and presidential elections in 2008. Activists from Pora and Znayu have held seminars on organizational techniques and movement development with their","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"113 1","pages":"73-85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81470298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}