Prof. Dr. Andrei Yakovlev 

Twenty years ago, one could hardly imagine there would be a full-scale war in Europe. Nevertheless, in February 2022, the Russian army launched such a war against Ukraine, triggering off one of the gravest crises in modern history. This project is an attempt to understand why such degradation of political and social institutions has become possible in Russia and what actions by internal and external actors can prevent similar processes in other countries.

The project will focus on a political economy analysis of relationships between the main groups in the Russian elites and society over the past 30 years, as well as an analysis of the interactions of the Russian elites with external actors represented by international organizations, transnational companies and foreign governments. One of the goals of the project is to show who and how — after the collapse of the Putin’s regime — could build a state in Russia that would be accountable to its citizens and capable of constructive cooperation with other countries.

As a theoretical base the project will use limited access orders framework elaborated in late works of Nobel Laureate Douglass North combined with varieties-of-capitalism approach. The project will employ large-scale empirical datasets collected by HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development in 2011-2021 in cooperation with prominent US and German scholars and will continue previous collaboration with researchers from University of Bremen.