Leonid Polishchuk, HSE University/Urban Institute, Washington DC
Civil Society Between Voice and Exit
Abstract
A persistent feature of Russia’s institutional and political development over the post-Soviet period has been the absence, with rare exceptions, of the country’s civil society from the political domain. We ascribe this pattern to the nature of Russian institutions dominated by the elites and downplaying societal input, and to an institutional learning process cultivating political “learned helplessness”. We discuss cooptation of the Russian civil society into apolitical collective action, offering an “exit” alternative to suppressed political “voice”. This outlook provides a unified comparative perspective for Russia’s major crises in the early 1990s, 1998, and 2022, revisiting the debates of the early 2000s as to whether Russia is a “normal country” or a sui generis case due to its unique geography and historical path-dependency.
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