I recently started watching the Yale Open Course series <Power and Politics in Today’s World> taught by Professor Ian Shapiro at Yale University. It seems like a nicely balanced political economy class, and I have so far been enjoying it. I’ll be posting notes for each lecture with diagrams.
The transition from the USSR to Russia seems to have been a process of disintegration, extraction, and cooption. Beset by the US’s containment policy as well as the series of independence movements of former Soviet countries, the USSR was losing grip over its own dominion and populace, eventually collapsing at the end of 1991. The August Coup of 1991, though unsuccessful on its own, was a pivotal point at which the transfer of powers from the USSR to Russia took place in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, respectively.
The disintegration was happening amidst a high level of corruption and dwindling loyalty among the elites. State assets were being extracted by former Soviet bureaucrats and oligarchs, and the haphazard transfer of power left room for these individuals to accrue political and economic power through the transition. Throughout the 1990s, the oligarchs further solidified their wealth and influence by taking advantage of the flailing Russian economy and by financing Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 1996.
Their influence waned with the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000 and his subsequent tax reforms and the crackdown on the oligarchs. However, Putin also began to form his own coterie of oligarchs, placing them in key positions in the government and business sectors. Russia still relies heavily on oil, partly due to the lobbying of these vested interests, although national revenue and geopolitical capital also contribute to the dominance of oil in the Russian economy.
For a more detailed diagram of the lecture, see below.
