Civil society is a complex concept developed in Western political theory. The applicability of the concept to analyses of non-Western societies has been questioned because of several issues related to the traditional meaning of the concept, i.e. democratisation bias, normative approach, and state-society distinctions. This paper has four main goals: (1) to evaluate the usefulness of the concept of civil society in research of hybrid regimes —a regime that combines democracy with authoritarianism, (2) to develop an adaptive view of civil society, (3) to assess how civil society functions in the Russian Federation—an example of a hybrid regime, and (4) to consider the potential generalizability of the adaptive view of civil society. Recent mass protests condemning fraud in the December 2011 parliamentary elections show that civil society needs to be taken into account in the analyses of regimes like Russia. An adaptive view derived from the state-in-society approach, which tries to avoid the traditionally applied dichotomy between state and society, allows adjustment of the concept of civil society to analysis of a hybrid regime and was used to study the state-society relations in Russia. Also, an adaptive view allowed for including in the analysis of Russian civil society a wide range of associations and movements competing for domination in the public space. Preliminary results of the analysis suggest that Russian civil society encompasses diverse forces: both forces representing the current regime (state) and forces opposing it. The Russian state uses sophisticated methods to influence and control (civil) society without abolishing it completely: politicising youth and creating GONGOs, institutionalising of civil society, and restricting oppositional organisations. The type of civil society that functions in Russia might be characteristic for hybrid regimes in general, where civil society is allowed, but has to function on the terms and conditions of the state.
