Commissioned Book Review: Alexander Baturo and Jos Elkink, The New Kremlinology: Understanding Regime Personalization in Russia, Comparative Politics
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299241258627 |
| Author | Hanjing Wang |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(4) NP17 –NP18
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1258627PSW0010.1177/14789299241258627Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2024
Commissioned Book Review
The New Kremlinology: Understanding Regime
Personalization in Russia, Comparative Politics by
Alexander Baturo and Jos Elkink. Oxford: Oxford
Academic, 2021, 232 pp., £ 71; online edn. ISBN
9780191918674 (online), ISBN 9780192896193
(print).
In Alexander Baturo and Jos Elkink’s book The
New Kremlinology: Understanding Regime
Personalization in Russia, they update the anal-
ysis of authoritarian elites in contemporary
Russia with new methods and empirical
approaches, which fill the gap of previous
Kremlinology.
This book’s main aim is to study the process
of regime personalisation and how it occurred.
The process of regime personalisation, according
to the authors, is ‘the personal power acquisition
by a political leader during, and as a result of,
which the regime itself may acquire different,
personalistic characteristics’ (pp. 3–4). Thus, the
authors base their analysis on three assumptions.
First, Putin’s personalist regime is still in the
making (p. 1). Second, personalism, or the pro-
cess of personalisation, is a feature of any politi-
cal regime (p. 2). Finally, personalism is a
complex and multifaceted feature of a regime
that goes beyond the degree of personal power
held by the political leader (p. 2). Before analys-
ing the Russian case and outlining its framework,
the study also explains the concept of personali-
sation. In conclusion, the authors demonstrate
that the Russian regime is personalist in the mak-
ing, but not all characteristics fit the personalist
regime (pp. 11–12, 173). These characteristics
changed over time since 1999 (p. 3).
The authors make several other important
contributions to further Kremlinology and com-
parative political studies. First, the authors pro-
pose the four most important pillars driving the
process of personalisation – patronage networks,
deinstitutionalisation, permanency in office and
media personalisation (pp. 12–13). They also
explain the logic behind picking up these four
characteristics for measuring the process of per-
sonalisation. Notably, this framework helps to
demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of this
process, rather than presenting it as one-dimen-
sional. Moreover, the authors consider the
Tandem period1 of Russian leadership to prove
how ruling elite members (including local gov-
ernors) viewed the power balance at the top,
which in turn could help to measure the endur-
ance of the leader’s power and the dynamics of
personalisation process indirectly (p. 109).
Second, the book specifies several concep-
tual definitions. For example, the authors delin-
eate the whole range of what is referred to as
‘Collective Putin’, inferring its composition
from personal affiliations of the most important
officials over time. Differing from the wide ref-
erence to the ruling coalition, key decision-
makers and Putin’s inner circle made by pundits
and observers, the authors divide personalities
in the ‘Collective Putin’ into four groups in
detail – his classmates from the law department
of Leningrad State University, KGB colleagues,
former officials in the Saint Petersburg mayor’s
office from 1991 to 1996, and other individuals
from Saint Petersburg whom Putin had known
prior to his presidency (pp. 50, 54). Notably,
they assess the 100 Most Influential (Leading)
Politicians of Russia monthly report (from 2002
Vox Populi-T) and the Nezavisimaya Gazeta to
identify the circle of ‘Collective Putin’ (pp. 51–
52). Compared to the Kremlinology of the
Soviet era, the authors’ approaches are more
convincing in showing the leader’s factions.
The book’s third major contribution regards
data selection and collection. Instead of relying
on central government official reports and the
change of central committees as Kremlinologists
did in the past, the authors pay attention to orig-
inal collected text data, such as federal and
regional annual ‘State of the Union’ addresses,
newspaper articles and television transcripts,
patron–client networks in Russia from 1999 to
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