I am grateful to Stephen Crowley for his thoughtful review of Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia. Like Crowley, I have long been concerned about the lack of scholarly voices in the national conversation about Russia—a conversation rife with stereotypes and myths and largely bereft of rigorous empirical studies. To this end, the book translates for a general audience the best social science research on Russia while also using many personal anecdotes gathered over 30 years of Russia watching to hold the interest of nonspecialists. It is gratifying that Crowley considers the book a success on these terms.
I also appreciate his encouragement to push the argument further. The book emphasizes the benefits of viewing Russia through the lens of recent research on personalist autocracies, which highlights the many difficult trade-offs inherent in these systems. Crowley applauds this effort but would like more discussion on the roots of this form of government in Russia and elsewhere. Is personalist autocracy a policy choice, a historical accident, or something more systematic? More generally, why are personalist autocracies increasingly prevalent?
These questions go beyond the scope of the book but are precisely the right ones. They are also unlikely to yield easy explanations. Rising economic inequality, global financial crises, changes in the media, policy failures in advanced democracies, increased migration, and autocracy promotion from Moscow and Beijing are likely culprits to one degree or another.
Turning to Russia and Eurasia, Crowley’s intuition to look at the impact of the Soviet legacy is a sound one. This may account for the unusually large number of personalist autocracies and the unusually long tenures of personal autocrats in the region. Economic assets also play a role. Personalist autocracies are entrenched in Eurasian countries whose primary economic assets are conducive to authoritarianism, such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, but failed to take deep roots in Eurasian countries with more diverse economies, such as Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan. For all their foibles, the latter countries have created more open and competitive political environments for much of the last 30 years.
More broadly, natural resource booms helped bolster personalist autocracy in Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. One might even consider the generous aid given to Belarus by Russia and to Hungary and Poland by the European Union as having effects similar to the resource curse. But this is not much help in accounting for the rise of personalist autocracies in many resource-poor countries like Turkey, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Perhaps the rise of personalist autocracies over the last 30 years simply reflects the demise of one-party and military autocracies, two forms of government that thrived during the Cold War with its emphasis on ideology and generous assistance to military regimes.
These are all topics for future work. And when the academic research on this important topic is done, I hope that someone writes a book for a general audience about their findings.
