This paper outlines a theoretical approach to Russian politics that goes beyond normative approaches to political dynamics as democratization or de-democratization. The paper approaches the question of how to define the underlying dynamics of Russian political development by distinguishing between the processes of state and regime building. These processes have generally been analyzed as one and the same in the study of Russian politics so that failure in each was synonymous with failure in the other. The paper develops a conceptual approach to distinguish the processes of state and regime formation and uses this to analyze the development of Russian politics in a comparative perspective. The paper analyzes the difficulties of achieving a reconciliation between the processes of state and regime building in Russia and argues that because of these difficulties we should be cautious about the future of the Russian state even as its power seems to have grown since 2000, and should recognize that the pressures of state building in Russia mean that current patterns of political development may prove as susceptible to change as those that preceded them. The paper’s analytical contribution as a result is that it overall develops a framework for the analysis of political development that is not static or focussed on one outcome (democracy or authoritarianism).
