Brian Taylor, professor of political science, has written “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford University Press, 2024).

In the book, Taylor offers an up-to-date overview of the key forces that drive Russian politics. Russia’s geography, historical background, and place in an international context are important for understanding the country’s internal political system and the potential for dynamism and change through powerful leaders, he argues. The book explores the primacy of the state over society, the role of the “West” in Russian political development, and the effect of the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union on the Russian political and economic system.

Taylor has written three other books: “The Code of Putinism” (Oxford University Press, 2018), “State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion After Communism” (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which was named one of the best international relations books of 2011 by Foreign Affairs, and “Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000” (Cambridge University Press, 2003). His research has been sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He was a Fulbright Scholar, a Carnegie Scholar, a Marshall Scholar and a Truman Scholar.

Taylor is director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and a senior research associate for the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration. He teaches courses on Russian and post-Soviet politics and comparative civil-military relations.

From the publisher:

“Russia is rarely out of the news. This has been particularly true since it launched the largest war in Europe since World War II when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. Yet Russian politics can be difficult to understand. It is powerfully shaped by large, impersonal forces such as geography, and Russia's place in the international political and economic system. At the same time, Russia's formal political institutions, such as the Constitution and electoral procedures, are relatively weak and manipulable compared to those of stable, established democracies. Under these circumstances, powerful leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin represent a source of potential dynamism and change.

This Very Short Introduction provides a guide to understanding Russian Politics that goes beyond the headlines, offering a vivid account of the key forces driving Russian politics. It places Russia in a global context while explaining its internal political development. Several major themes run through the book, including the primacy of the state over society, the role of the so-called "West," which has represented a source of inspiration, of threat, and of competition for generations of Russians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet collapse brought about dramatic change across multiple spheres, from the nature of the political and economic system to the country's borders and who counted as a citizen. To this day, Russia is still working its way through the consequences of these transformations.”