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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has developed a powerful business community and a potent network of transnational organized groups. Russian Business Power explores the powerful impact these new actors are having on the evolution of the Russian state and its foreign behaviour. Unlike other books, which focus either on Russia's foreign and security policy, or on the evolution of Russian business, legal and illegal, within the context of Russia's domestic transition, this book considers how far Russia's foreign and security policy is shaped by business. It considers a wide range of issues, including energy, the arms trade, international drug flows, and human trafficking, and examines the impact of Russian business in Russia's dealings with Western and Eastern Europe, the Caspian, the Caucasus and the Far East.
Russia’s use of its vast energy resources for leverage against post-Soviet states such as Ukraine is widely recognized as a threat. Yet we cannot understand this danger without also understanding the opportunity that Russian energy represents. From corruption-related profits to transportation-fee income to subsidized prices, many within these states have benefited by participating in Russian energy exports. To understand Russian energy power in the region, it is necessary to look at the entire value chain—including production, processing, transportation, and marketing—and at the full spectrum of domestic and external actors involved, from Gazprom to regional oligarchs to European Union regulators. This book follows Russia’s three largest fossil-fuel exports—natural gas, oil, and coal—from production in Siberia through transportation via Ukraine to final use in Germany in order to understand the tension between energy as threat and as opportunity. Margarita M. Balmaceda reveals how this dynamic has been a key driver of political development in post-Soviet states in the period between independence in 1991 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. She analyzes how the physical characteristics of different types of energy, by shaping how they can be transported, distributed, and even stolen, affect how each is used—not only technically but also politically. Both a geopolitical travelogue of the journey of three fossil fuels across continents and an incisive analysis of technology’s role in fossil-fuel politics and economics, this book offers new ways of thinking about energy in Eurasia and beyond.
Russia is the world's foremost energy superpower, rivaling Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer and accounting for a quarter of the world's exports of natural gas. Russia's energy reserves account for half of the world's probable oil reserves and a third of the world's proven natural gas reserves. Whereas military might and nuclear weapons formed the core of Soviet cold war power, since 1991 the Russian state has viewed its monopolistic control of Russia's energy resources as the core of its power now and for the future. Since 2005, the international news has been filled with Russia's repeated demonstrations of its readiness to use price, transit fees, and supply of gas and oil exports as punitive policy instruments against recalcitrant states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, striking in turn the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, and Lithuania. Orban reveals for the first time in Power, Energy, and the New Russian Imperialism Russia's readiness to wield the same energy weapon against her neighbors on the west, all of them former Soviet satellite states but now EU and NATO member nations: the three Baltic nations and the five East European nations of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Orban shows how the Kremlin since 1991 has systematically used Russian energy companies as players in a concerted neo-mercantilist, energy-based foreign policy designed to further Russia's neo-imperial ambitions among America's key allies in Central East Europe. Her unprecedented analysis is key to predicting Russia's strategic response to American negotiations with Poland and the Czech Republic to host the US missile shield. She also reveals the economic and diplomatic modus operandi by which Russia will increasingly apply its energy clout to shape and coerce the foreign policies of the West European members of the EU, as Russia's contribution to EU gas consumption increases from a quarter today to three-quarters by 2020. Orban proves that Russia's neo-mercantilist energy strategy in East Europe is not at all dependent on the person of Putin, but began under Yeltsin and continues under Medvedev, the former chairman of Gazprom.
The Russian State and Russian Energy Companies analyses the development of relations between the state and five major energy companies, and how this shaped Russia’s foreign policy in the post-Soviet region. The book argues that the development of Russia’s political economy mattered for foreign policy over the quarter of a century from 1992 to 2018. Energy companies’ roles in institutional development enabled them to influence foreign policy formation, and they became available as tools to implement foreign policy. The extent to which it happened for each company varied with their accessibility to the Russian state. Institutional development increased state capacity, in a way that strengthened Russia’s political regime. The book shows how the combined power of several companies in the gas, oil, electricity, and nuclear energy industry was a key feature of Russian foreign policy, both in bilateral relationships and in support of Russia’s regional position. In this way, Russia’s energy resources were converted to regional influence. The book contributes to our understanding of Russia’s political economy and its influence on foreign policy, and of the formation of policy towards post-Soviet states.
'Russia is an increasingly important player in global energy markets, yet its policies are under-researched and little understood. This collection represents an important and sophisticated contribution to the debate. While much of the commentary on Russian energy consists of generalizations about Russia's political strategy, this work lifts the lid and looks inside the process through which Russian energy policies are designed and implemented. It brings together essays by top specialists in the field, and makes a conscious effort to integrate the various disciplines of politics, economics and geography by developing a model of the "cognitive frames" through which the policy process is shaped. It addresses both domestic and international dimensions of the problem, and gives equal weight to traditional customers in Europe and new markets in Asia.' Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University, US 'The book explains Russian energy policies, instead of a policy. It portrays a picture with multiple policy drivers, including institutional, regional and federal, environmental and commercial. The study markedly improves our understanding of the multifaceted nature of Russian energy policy, a topical and complex issue. This is a highly commendable book that should be included in the reading lists of anyone with an interest in the role of energy in Russia's political economy or energy matters more generally.' Kim Talus, University College London, Australia Russia's vast energy reserves, and its policies towards them have enormous importance in the current geopolitical landscape. This important book examines Russia's energy policies on the national, interregional and global level. It pays particular attention to energy policy actors ranging from state, federal and regional actors, to energy companies and international financial actors and organizations. The book models the formation of Russia's energy policies in terms of how energy policy actors perceive and map their policy environment. The case studies cover federal, regional and environmental aspects of Russian energy policy, Russia's energy relations with Europe and the CIS, North East Asia, the globalization of Russian oil companies and the political economy of Russian energy. It is found that there are several concurrent energy policies in contemporary Russia, and that this situation is likely to continue. These policies are conducted primarily from the business frame perspective while notions of energy superpower Russia are found more ambiguous. Russia's Energy Policies will benefit advanced master's level students, doctoral students, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners. The book will be a great resource for advanced international relations, political economy, international business and globalisation courses alongside energy policy courses, as well as area studies courses on Russian, post-Soviet and European politics and environmental politics.
A nuanced and comprehensive study of the political dynamics between Russia and key countries in Southeast Europe Is Russia threatening to disrupt more than two decades' of E.U. and U.S. efforts to promote stability in post-communist Southeast Europe? Politicians and commentators in the West say, "yes." With rising global anxiety over Russia's political policies and objectives, Dimitar Bechev provides the only in-depth look at this volatile region. Deftly unpacking the nature and extent of Russian influence in the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, Bechev argues that both sides are driven by pragmatism and opportunism rather than historical loyalties. Russia is seeking to assert its role in Europe's security architecture, establish alternative routes for its gas exports--including the contested Southern Gas Corridor--and score points against the West. Yet, leaders in these areas are allowing Russia to reinsert itself to serve their own goals. This urgently needed guide analyzes the responses of regional NATO members, particularly regarding the annexation of Crimea and the Putin-Erdogan rift over Syria.
Russia is among the world’s leading oil producers, sitting atop the planet’s eighth largest reserves. Like other oil-producing nations, it has been profoundly transformed by the oil industry. In The Depths of Russia, Douglas Rogers offers a nuanced and multifaceted analysis of oil’s place in Soviet and Russian life, based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the Perm region of the Urals. Moving beyond models of oil calibrated to capitalist centers and postcolonial "petrostates," Rogers traces the distinctive contours of the socialist—and then postsocialist—oil complex, showing how oil has figured in the making and remaking of space and time, state and corporation, exchange and money, and past and present. He pays special attention to the material properties and transformations of oil (from depth in subsoil deposits to toxicity in refining) and to the ways oil has echoed through a range of cultural registers. The Depths of Russia challenges the common focus on high politics and Kremlin intrigue by considering the role of oil in barter exchanges and surrogate currencies, industry-sponsored social and cultural development initiatives, and the city of Perm’s campaign to become a European Capital of Culture. Rogers also situates Soviet and post-Soviet oil in global contexts, showing that many of the forms of state and corporate power that emerged in Russia after socialism are not outliers but very much part of a global family of state-corporate alliances gathered at the intersection of corporate social responsibility, cultural sponsorship, and the energy and extractive industries.
When Vladimir Putin first took power in 1999, he was a little-known figure ruling a country that was reeling from a decade and a half of crisis. In the years since, he has reestablished Russia as a great power. How did he do it? What principles have guided Putin's economic policies? What patterns can be discerned? In this new analysis of Putin's Russia, Chris Miller examines its economic policy and the tools Russia's elite have used to achieve its goals. Miller argues that despite Russia's corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin's economic strategy has been surprisingly successful. Explaining the economic policies that underwrote Putin's two-decades-long rule, Miller shows how, at every juncture, Putinomics has served Putin's needs by guaranteeing economic stability and supporting his accumulation of power. Even in the face of Western financial sanctions and low oil prices, Putin has never been more relevant on the world stage.
Moscow in Movement is the first exhaustive study of social movements, protest, and the state-society relationship in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Beginning in 2005 and running through the summer of 2013, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between citizens and their state through a series of in-depth case studies, explaining how Russians mobilized to defend human and civil rights, the environment, and individual and group interests: a process that culminated in the dramatic election protests of 2011–2012 and their aftermath. To understand where this surprising mobilization came from, and what it might mean for Russia's political future, the author looks beyond blanket arguments about the impact of low levels of trust, the weight of the Soviet legacy, or authoritarian repression, and finds an active and boisterous citizenry that nevertheless struggles to gain traction against a ruling elite that would prefer to ignore them. On a broader level, the core argument of this volume is that political elites, by structuring the political arena, exert a decisive influence on the patterns of collective behavior that make up civil society—and the author seeks to test this theory by applying it to observable facts in historical and comparative perspective. Moscow in Movement will be of interest to anyone looking for a bottom-up, citizens' eye view of recent Russian history, and especially to scholars and students of contemporary Russian politics and society, comparative politics, and sociology.
Introduction: the guns of August -- Contours of Russian foreign policy -- Bulldogs fighting under the rug: the making of Russian foreign policy -- Resetting expectations: Russia and the United States -- Europe: between integration and confrontation -- Rising China and Russia's Asian vector -- Playing with home field advantage? Russia and its post-Soviet neighbors -- Conclusion: dealing with Russia's foreign policy reawakening.