The paper explores political power attitudes towards social pluralism in post-Soviet Russia as a way to better understand the mechanisms of functioning and self-preservation of this political system as a whole. The relevance of such an analysis lies in the fact that the Russian case can provide useful insights to better grasp the way the contemporary forms of authoritarian governance can survive in the era of democracy and find legitimacy. This analysis is aimed at linking the notion of “new authoritarianisms”, which has gained momentum in current literature on regime transformations, to Russia''s public space, documenting this dimension empirically. As such, it wants to contribute to clarify a current research topic in Comparative politics—the response of post-modern authoritarian regimes to external pressures to democratise—and to advancing that discussion in the Russian case. Indeed, while this issue is being increasingly discussed within the semi-authoritarian regimes literature, so far few researches have explored its specific links with the social space. The basic argument is that there is a conscious choice from the incumbents aimed at establishing a “legitimised” civil society where social actors can arrange their activity without challenging directly the official power. In the attempt to adapt the notion of “sovereign democracy” to the needs of integration in a globalised world, the rhetoric of civil society is used with a specific meaning, which differs from that linked to liberal democracies; instead of being conceived as a part of society which operates outside, and sometimes in opposition to, the realm of the State, it corresponds to a space directly managed from above. The paper will focus on one specific aspect of such an “institutionalised” civil society, namely the “Obschestvennaya Palata Rossiyskoy Federatsii”, a sort of public Chamber where the main social interests are supposed to be represented.
