Understanding Russia: The Challenges of Transformation

by Marlène Laruelle, Jean Radvanyi

This timely book provides a balanced and comprehensive overview of the geographical, historical, political, cultural, and geostrategic factors that drive Russia today. Russia has long inspired fear in the West, but as the authors argue, Russia is fearful as well. Three decades after the transformations launched by perestroika, multiple ghosts haunt both Russian elites and ordinary citizens, ranging from concerns about territorial challenges, societal transformations, and economic decline to worries about the country’s vulnerability to external intervention. Faced with a West that emerged victorious from the Cold War, a shockingly dynamic China, and former Soviet republics claiming their right to emancipate themselves from Moscow’s stranglehold, Russia is constantly questioning its identity, its development path, and its role on the international scene. The country hesitates between two take refuge in a new isolation and revive the old notion of being a “besieged fortress,” or replay the messianic myth of a Third Rome, the last bastion of Christian values in the face of a decadent West. Explaining Russia’s perspective, Marlene Laruelle and Jean Radvanyi offers a much-needed analysis that will help readers understand how the country deals with its domestic issues and how these influence Russian foreign policy.

Genres: Russia

184 pages, Paperback

Published August 16, 2018

About the author

Dr. Marlene Laruelle is Associate Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) and Research Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. She previously was a Visiting Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2005–2006). She holds a Ph.D. from the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Cultures in Paris. She has authored numerous books, including Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (Palgrave, 2009), and Russia’s Strategies in the Arctic and the Future of the Far North (M.E. Sharpe, 2013). She recently edited Eurasianism and the European Far Right. Reshaping the Russia-Europe relationship (Lexington, 2015). She is a co-PI on several NSF grants devoted to Arctic Urban Sustainability.

Reviews

[Neil H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Russia, a behemoth if ever there was one. Full of history, culture and linguistic diversity. Yet, its sheer size underlines much of its current malaise; geographic robustness, centralised control, fluid demographics, changing workforce ability and a perpetual fascination with maintaining near distance federal control of the balkans. Coming out of the cold war, where the ideological stirrings between democratic institutions and communist Soviet Union bespeaks a confusion of forging a future that recognises its immense past and a determined effort to oppose the values of Western; read American influence. Russia invokes and dabbles quite extensively in promoting conservative values and soft power. Believing in a country's sovereignty to decide its manner of governance not unlike those of China. Russia in the wake from its 1990's deconstruction will have to manage its divisive populations seeking comfortable and dignified existence.

[Vada Andrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

great now I understand russia