Russia - Lost in Transition The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies

As Russia is in the news, startling the international community with its assertiveness and facing both parliamentary and presidential elections, Lilia Shevtsova searches the histories of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes, exploring within them conventional truths and myths about Russia, paradoxes of Russian political development, and Russiaâ??s role in the world. Russiaâ??Lost in Transition discovers a logic of government in Russiaâ?? a political regime and the type of capitalism that were formulated over the course of the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies and will continue to dominate Russiaâ??s trajectory in the near-term.

Looking forward as well as back, Shevtsova speculates about the upcoming elections, the self-perpetuating system in placeâ??the legacies of Yeltsin and Putinâ??and how it will dictate the immediate political future, and explores several scenarios for Russiaâ??s future over the next decade.

Lilia Shevtsova co-chairs the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dividing her time between the Carnegie office in Washington, D.C. and the Carnegie Moscow Center.