This book identifies nine strategies dictators use to legitimate their rule in the eyes of regime insiders, and then shows how these strategies have been used over the life of the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes. Drawing on analysis of the experience of all of the major Soviet and post-Soviet leaders, it charts the success with which each individual leader has utilised these strategies, and thereby offers an explanation of why some leaders have been highly successful and others less so. The ramifications of the analysis spread far beyond the specific case studies, offering an insight into the way that dictatorial rule in general is stabilised. The book will appeal not just to Soviet or Russian specialists, but to all of those interested in how dictatorship works and legitimacy is established.
Chapter 1: Personalist Strategies.
Chapter 2: Soviet I Lenin and
Stalin.
Chapter 3: Soviet II Post Stalin.
Chapter 4: Post Soviet.
Chapter
5: An Optimum Strategy?.
Graeme Gill is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney, having retired from there in 2014. He has taught and researched in the areas of Soviet and Russian politics, authoritarian politics, state development, and democratisation for more than 40 years, mostly at the University of Sydney but prior to that at the University of Tasmania. He has published 28 books (including 10 with Palgrave Macmillan) and more than 100 articles. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a past president of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) and of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies (now Australasian Association for Euro-Asian Studies).
