M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (2024).
Since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power at the end of the 1990s, siloviki—the people who work for, or used to work for, Russia’s “ministries of force” have spread to posts…
Vladimir Putin aspires to be a classic authoritarian modernizer, but in today's globalized world Russia faces challenges that bureaucratic centralization and a traditional strong hand cannot meet.