Building an Authoritarian Polity: Russia in Post-Soviet Times

According to Gill, Russia is a "hybrid personalist/party regime, a regime in which the primary dynamic has been the will of the leader rather than any institutional imperative (158)."[...]Gill's discussion of the role that United Russia plays in Putin's Russia breaks new ground in the understanding of the role of single and dominant parties in authoritarian regimes.[...]Gill presents the evolution of the Russia's current political system as the result of rational solutions to discrete and important problems of state-building, highlighting differences in style and strategy between Russia's two most important post-Soviet presidents, El[...]tsin and Putin, a much-needed addition to our current understanding of Russia today.