Robert Horvath - Putins ʻpreventive Counter-revolutionʼ: Post-Soviet Authoritarianism and the Spectre of Velvet Revolution

This book examines the preventive counter-revolution, a programme of reforms and repression that transformed the face of Russian politics during Vladimir Putins second term as president. Kremlin propagandists hailed this programme as a defence of national sovereignty against Western attempts to foment a velvet revolution in Russia. But this book shows that the Putin regime was reacting to a real domestic threat: opposition leaders and youth activists who had begun to employ velvet revolutionary methods in a campaign to harness popular grievances and to challenge Putin in the streets and at the ballot box. It traces the formulation and implementation of the regimes two-track response, which was based on a careful analysis of the lessons of the recent velvet (or coloured) revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. The first track was repressive: the imposition of controls on NGOs and restrictions on electoral competition, and a crackdown on opposition demonstrations. The second was the mobilisation of supporters in patriotic youth organisations that employed both gang violence and velvet revolutionary techniques. Drawing on a wide range of Russian-language sources, including opposition activists blogs, this book charts the end of Russias experiment with liberal democracy and the emergence of a new type of authoritarian order.

Robert Horvath is a research fellow at La Trobe University, Australia.

Edited by Richard Sakwa
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent

Editorial Committee:

Julian Cooper, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham

Terry Cox, Department of Central and East European Studies, University of Glasgow

Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath

David Moon, Department of History, University of Durham

Hilary Pilkington, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

Graham Timmins, Department of Politics, University of Stirling

Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow

Founding Editorial Committee Member:

George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley

This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality, research-level work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and social science subjects.