The State that Betrays the Trust: How Regional Autocrats in Russia Use Public Sector Organizations to Safeguard the Regime

• In Event: Contemporary Russian Political Technologies

Abstract

This paper explores how regional autocrats in Russia utilize public sector and social services organizations to control the population, monitor dissent, falsify electoral results, and channel popular protest away from threatening the regime. Public sector organizations are a unique tool in autocrats' hands because of their embeddedness to the community and the trusted status of their workers who contact the population on a daily basis. Public sector organizational networks are ubiquitous in many contemporary states with high infrastructural power, and can be used by autocrats to prevent or respond to challenges to their rule. These networks work in conjunction with the rest of the state apparatus, providing the infrastructural capacity that cannot be achieved without them.

The paper is based on archival research and interviews in five Russian regions (Rostovskaya Oblast', Respublica Tatarstan, Tomskaya Oblast', Respublica Altai, and Kemerovskaya oblast), whose local political regimes differ in their ability to implement political decisions on the ground. Specifically, the paper looks at pensioner, youth, and educational organizations. It shows that some regional governments turn them into a machine that helps to safeguard the regime. In other regions, though, the attempts to build such a machine encounter resistance of local communities and the organizational infrastructure fails to work as autocrats intend.

Author

• Natalia Forrat, Northwestern U