Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 25, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Irina Busygina. Moderated by Elise Giuliano.
In Russia, the last year has seen significant changes in federal-regional power dynamics. While the model of the center-regional relationship as a whole remains unchanged, the war makes adjustments to it which could play an important role in Russia’s political development. In 2024, the Kremlin nominated new faces from the regions to meet the challenge of “integrating the war into the national economy.” Regional politicians who made their way to Moscow are actively building their patronal networks, while in the regions former technocrat governors imitate the style of public politicians. This new young cohort from the regions and in the regions may end up challenging not only Putin’s “old guard” but Putin himself.
Irina Busygina is a Research Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Until 2022 she worked as Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and International Relations (Higher School of Economics at Saint Petersburg, Russia) and headed the Center for Comparative Governance Studies. Her research interests include comparative federalism and decentralization, Russian domestic and foreign policy, Russia-EU relations. Her latest publications include “Center-regional relations in Russia”. In: Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society. Ed. by Graeme Gill. UK: Routledge, 2023; “Ready to Protest? Explaining Protest Potential in Russian Regional Capitals.” Regional and Federal Studies published online January 2023; “Pandemic Decentralization: COVID-19 and Principal–Agent Relations in Russia.” Problems of Post-Communism, Published online: 14 Sep 2022; “Russia – EU Relations and the Common Neighborhood: Coercion versus Authority”, UK: Routledge, 2018. Her most recent book is “Non-Democratic Federalism and Decentralization in Post-Soviet States” (together with Mikhail Filippov, forthcoming in Routledge in 2023). She taught a course “Russia and the European Union” at the Harriman Institute in 2023.
