1st Edition
The State and Big Business in Russia Understanding Kremlin–Business Relations in the Early Putin Era
This book presents a study of the complex relationship between the Russian state and big business during Vladimir Putin’s first two presidential terms (2000–2008). Based on extensive original research, it focuses on the interaction of Russia’s political executive with the ‘oligarchs’. It shows how Putin’s crackdown on this elite group led big business to accept new ‘rules of the game’ and how this was accompanied by the involvement of big business in policy formulation, particularly through the organisational vehicle of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP). It goes on to discuss why Yukos and its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky were targeted by Russia’s political authorities and the resultant consequences, namely the end of the relatively successful framework via which state-business relations had been managed, and its replacement by fear and mutual distrust, along with a vastly expanded role for the state, and state-related actors, in the Russian corporate sector. The book explores all these developments in detail and sets them against the context of continued trends towards greater authoritarianism in Russia.
1. Introduction 2. A Corporatist Interpretation of State-Business Relations in Putin’s Russia 3. The State Reasserted: The Decline of the ‘Oligarchy’ 4. Putin’s New ‘Rules of the Game’: Institutionalising Russia’s Business Elite 5. All the President’s Men: The Influence of the Presidential Administration 6. Business Associations in Russia: The Early Putin Era 7. The RSPP: A Case Study in Collective Lobbying 8. The Yukos Affair: Causes and Motives 9. Khodorkovsky’s Arrest: Russia’s Business Elite Reacts 10. Postscript
Biography
Tina Jennings is a Foundation Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and was a Research Fellow at the College's Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (2008–2018).
