Central authority domination as a most important peculiarity of the Russian political system is being implemented in an already modernized (although not
always sufficiently) institutional environment. Here we ought to speak not as much about the Russian paradox of a neoliberal path to neo-patrimonialism as about
the occurrence of a very grave power tension in the range between stability
and transformation. This concerns both the reforms of the 1990’s and the «state comeback» in the early 2000’s when this tension was only multiplied.
Keywords
Russia of the 1990s, political system, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, patrimonialism.
