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This book presents a cultural history of the politics of Russian language from Gorbachev and glasnost to Putin and the emergence of new generations of Web technologies. The book begins from the premise that periods of rapid and radical change both shape and are shaped by language. It documents the role and fate of the Russian language in the collapse of the USSR and the decades of reform and national reconstruction that have followed. The book demonstrates the inextricable linkage of language and politics in everything from dictionaries of profanity to the flood of publications on linguistic self-help, the speech patterns of the country's leaders, the blogs of its bureaucrats, and the official programs promoting the use of Russian in the so-called near abroad. The book explains why glasnost figured as such a critical rhetorical battleground in the political strife that led to the Soviet Union's collapse and shows why Russians came to deride the newfound freedom of speech of the 1990s as little more than the right to swear in public. It assesses the impact of Medvedev's role as Blogger-in-Chief and the role Putin's vulgar speech practices played in the restoration of national pride. The book investigates whether Internet communication and new media technologies have helped to consolidate a more vibrant democracy and civil society or if they serve as an additional resource for the political technologies manipulated by the Kremlin.

Demands for national independence among ethnic minorities around the world suggest the power of nationalism. Contemporary nationalist movements can quickly attract fervent followings, but they can just as rapidly lose support. This book asks why people with ethnic identities throw their support behind nationalism in some cases but remain quiescent in others. Popular support for nationalism develops as part of the process of political mobilization—a process that itself transforms the meaning of ethnic identity. The book compares sixteen ethnic republics of the Russian Federation, where nationalist mobilization varied widely during the early 1990s despite a common Soviet inheritance. It argues that people respond to nationalist leaders after developing a group grievance. Ethnic grievances develop out of the interaction between people's lived experiences and the specific messages that nationalist entrepreneurs put forward concerning ethnic group disadvantage. The book shows that in Russia, ethnic grievances developed rapidly in certain republics in the late Soviet era when messages articulated by nationalist leaders about ethnic inequality in local labor markets resonated with people's experience of growing job insecurity in a contracting economy. In other republics, where nationalist leaders focused on articulating other issues, such as cultural and language problems facing the ethnic group, group grievances failed to develop, and popular support for nationalism stalled. The book concludes that people with ethnic identities do not form political interest groups primed to support ethnic politicians and movements for national secession.

In 2009, the Russian government launched a much-publicized new initiative to tackle excessive alcohol consumption. This has subsequently been presented in simplistic terms as a top–down implementation of policy, imposed in the national interest to preserve the nation’s health in face of the ravages inflicted by widespread alcohol abuse. The book challenges this widely accepted narrative, by showing how policy more commonly results from the competitive interactions of stakeholders with vested interests – with the state itself divided. Rather than a benevolent public health agenda, the interests in vodka production of some of Putin’s closest cronies provides a hidden explanatory factor behind increasingly harsh regulation of beer in Russia. The book uses the lens of alcohol policy to examine the complex kleptocracy in the Russian political economy, and to show how informal power networks can undermine formal state priorities. The analysis reveals the many ambivalences, informal practices and paradoxes that abound in contemporary Russian politics.

This book introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, an international think tank established by the U.S. and Soviet governments to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s IIASA in Austria was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War divide could work together to articulate and solve world problems. This think tank was a rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation, where leading Soviet scientists could try out their innovative ideas, benefit from access to Western literature, and develop social networks, thus paving the way for some of the key science and policy breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Ambitious diplomatic, scientific, and organizational strategies were employed to make this arena for cooperation work for global change. Under the umbrella of the systems approach, East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future and the anthropogenic impact on the environment, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The book shows how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

In response to a growing human trafficking problem and domestic and international pressure, human trafficking and the use of slave labor were first criminalized in Russia in 2003. This book explains why Russian police, prosecutors, and judges have largely ignored this new weapon in their legal arsenal, despite the fact that the law was intended to make it easier to pursue trafficking cases. The book explores how trafficking cases make their way through the criminal justice system, covering multiple forms of the crime—sexual, labor, and child trafficking—over the period 2003–13. It argues that to understand how law enforcement agencies have dealt with trafficking, it is critical to understand how their “institutional machinery”—the incentives, culture, and structure of their organizations—channels decision-making on human trafficking cases toward a familiar set of routines and practices and away from using the new law. As a result, law enforcement often chooses to charge and prosecute traffickers with related crimes, such as kidnapping or recruitment into prostitution, rather than under the 2003 trafficking law because these other charges are more familiar and easier to bring to a successful resolution. In other words, after ten years of practice, Russian law enforcement has settled on a policy of prosecuting traffickers, not trafficking.