Putinism: A Praetorian System? Russie.Nei.Visions, No. 106, Ifri, March 2018
Almost 20 years after Vladimir Putin's accession to the presidency in 2000, how should the Russian political system be defined?
Authoritarian modernization initiative, guided or non-competitive democracy, neo-Soviet regime, new nomenklatura, militocracy, “government in uniform”— there is no shortage of descriptions. This study proposes a framework for analyzing the evolution of the Russian political system under Putin's leadership which is not restricted to a comparison with the western model of liberal democracy.
The concept of “praetorianism” is the common thread that enables us to understand the political actions carried out at the highest level of the Russian state, in terms of both domestic and foreign policy, and to look ahead, on the eve of the 2018 presidential election, to the possible future developments of the exercising of power in Russia.
Jean-Robert Raviot is a doctor of political science with accreditation to supervise research and professor of contemporary Russian civilization at Paris Nanterre University. He supervises the master's in Russian and post-Soviet studies and jointly supervises the bilingual Franco-Russian law course.