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The rationale of organizational control: managing the political opposition in Putin’s Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Andrei Semenov
Andrei Semenov*
Affiliation:
Perm Federal Research Center, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lenina 13a, Perm, Russia 614990
*
E-mail: andreysemenov@comparativestudies.ru
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Abstract

How did Vladimir Putin manage to turn the vociferous political opposition of the 1990s in Russia into a mere statist? I argue that among the wide array of instruments mastered by Putin’s regime, the control over the organisational environment stands apart. By regulating the formation and maintenance of the political organisations, the regime was able to divide the opposition into its ‘systemic’ and ‘non-systemic’ components. The restrictions on the organisational development set limits to the societal outreach of the opposition. Finally, by manipulating the rules of access to the institutional arenas and resource flows, the regime fostered differential stimuli for the opposition groups that made the coordination among them unlikely. This article suggests that not less than being informational or coercive, the autocracies like Russia under Vladimir Putin have to control the organisational environment in order to keep the opposition at bay.

Keywords

Electoral autocracyPolitical oppositionRussian politics

Information

Type
Symposium
Information
European Political Science , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 580 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 European Consortium for Political Research

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