Jeffrey Kahn, Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia. London: Oxford University Press, 2002, 300 pp.

Extract

Like the declarations of the newly empowered republican elites in Jeffrey Kahn's text, murky notions of federalism, democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law mar current debates about Russian federalism. Lacking some foundational understanding of these concepts as applied to the Russian context, analysts neither agree on the nature of the problems nor the potential means to resolve them and analyses frequently degenerate into subjective judgments about the intentions of political actors involved in the institution-building process. Jeffrey Kahn's Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia comes the closest of any currently available work to providing a framework for discussions of Russian federal reform by tracing the development of contemporary Russian federalism and attempting to place it within a carefully constructed federal typology. In this respect, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in issues of federalism and post-Soviet Russia.