With the collapse of Soviet rule in 1991, Russia was widely seen both within the country and outside to be embarking on the road to a democratic future. The democratic mobilization and consequent partial opening of the political system in the last years of perestroika (especially 1988–91) encouraged many to believe that Russia would slough off its authoritarian past and proceed to build a democratic polity. However, such hopes were doomed to disappointment, as the potential for democratization was snuffed out and an authoritarian polity built. This book seeks to understand how an authoritarian polity could be built and become consolidated in Russia and the potential for democratic development thereby blunted.

The Russian experience of a potential opening to democracy being closed off by a reassertion of authoritarian rule was not unique. This was one possible trajectory of development for states that experienced political change during the so-called third wave of democratization during the last decades of the twentieth and first of the twenty-first century. Despite the characterization of these years as a period of democratization, the survival, resilience, and even emergence of authoritarian rule was a significant trend – as of 2013, some 54 percent of all regimes on the globe were adjudged not to be free – and has led, belatedly, to an interest in the reasons for the survival of authoritarian regimes. This essentially means the question of the bases of stability of these regimes: why do they survive and how do they cope with challenges?

Attempts to explain authoritarian rule, including in Russia, have generally focused either on questions of legacy or path dependency, or on the primacy of the actions of particular actors.

Two basic types of legacy explanations have been advanced to explain authoritarian stability: a focus on values, and a concentration upon the circumstances of the regime's birth. In both cases, the argument is that the regime is sustained by factors stemming from the past. This has been a common characteristic of analyses of Russian development.