Perry Anderson has a long survey of Russia's recent political history and future form, touching on some interesting factual and theoretical ground.

Anderson refers to the current shape of the Russian polity as a Managed Democracy, where elections are held but the outcome is predetermined, and power is held by a contiguous elite with little institutional input from non-elites. It would seem to have a broader application than Russia - Pakistan comes to mind. Anderson points out that the foundation of this regime was established under supposed democrat and reformer Yeltsin:

Far from the demise of the USSR reducing the number of Russian functionaries, the bureaucracy had - few post-Communist facts are more arresting - actually doubled in size by the end of Yeltsin's stewardship, to some 1.3 million. Not only that. At the topmost levels of the regime, the proportion of officials drawn from the security services or armed forces soared above their modest quotas under the late CPSU: composing a mere 5 per cent under Gorbachev, it has been calculated that they occupied no less than 47 per cent of the highest posts under Yeltsin.

Later in the article, there's an echo of Peter Turchin and Ibn Khaldun in a cyclic analysis of the state:

If the second phase in the cycle of managed democracy is now coming to an end in Russia, what of the third and fourth phases, comparable to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods under Communism? The whole cycle, Furman replies, will be much shorter - not seventy, but about thirty years. We are probably at midpoint right now. As for the future: the Russian intelligentsia was briefly in power in 1991, but its ideology was primitive and its outlook naive. So when the democracy it wanted was discarded by Yeltsin, the defeat of democracy was the defeat of this intelligentsia too. Only when Russian intellectuals have produced a self-critical assessment of this experience will it be able to develop new and sounder ideals for the future.

Furman was a historian of ancient religions for many years before turning his eye to modern Russia, which may account for his fondness for cycles.

Sociologist Georgi Derlugian also makes a telling observation about Russia's imperial past.

Capitalism in the globalisation mode is antithetical to the mercantilist bureaucratic empires that specialised in maximising military might and geopolitical throw-weight - the very pursuits in which Russian and Soviet rulers were enmeshed for centuries.

As Anderson repeatedly implies, managed democracy may turn out to be a stable political system, at least on timescales of a century or so, which is the sort of timescale states have to treat as thick reality. Liberal democracy, though more desirable, is not inevitable.

More Reading on Russia

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• Perry Anderson
• Managed Democracy
• Cliodynamics
• Russian Oil Subsidies
• Early Voting in Russia
• Post Cold War Russia and American Relations
• Patronage in Putin's Russia
• Russia's Managed Democracy
• Georgian Realpolitick
• Neo-Conservatism and Georgia