The regional dimension of Russia’s resilience during its war against Ukraine: an introduction

ABSTRACT This symposium challenges the common perception that authoritarian regimes are less resilient than democratic ones because they lack the sources of democratic resilience. We focus on Russia, a personalist authoritarian regime, which has demonstrated a surprisingly high level of resilience during its war against Ukraine. We argue that for a territorially large and diverse country such as Russia, the critical dimension of resilience is manifested in maintaining central control over the entire territory of the country during times of crisis. Contributions in this issue explore the sources and limits of Russia’s territorial resilience. We argue that, while the personalist regime in Russia has demonstrated coping and adaptive dimensions of resilience, its transformative dimension remains questionable.


Introduction to the special issue
In the modern world shocks and crises of various origins and types have become a norm rather than an exception.In the words of Fareed Zakaria, "a seemingly endless plethora of public health, economic, social, and environmental crises pushed the world into a continuous vacuum of uncharted territory." 1 Recently, geopolitical crises have been added to this long list -Russia's war against Ukraine, unfolding in the center of Europe, and the Israel-Hamas war.There is no reason to expect that the future will bring fewer crises to the world.It is therefore crucial to "chart this territory," and to build resilience -the ability to live with and through crises.The states -both democratic and authoritarian -have demonstrated very different abilities to cope with recent crises.However, unexpectedly, the states that experts anticipated would experience regression or even collapse showed instead an impressive capacity to absorb crises and adapt to shocks.As a result of these developments, the concept of resilience has become widely discussed (Brown 2022).
While the number of political science publications focusing on resilience is increasing, the analysis of political regimes "through the lens of resilience" remains new (Holloway and Manwaring 2023, 69).In fact, scholars studying democratic regimes have only recently started to utilize the concept of resilience accompanying it with careful theorizing, definition, and operationalization (Holloway and Manwaring 2023, 69).According to Volacu and Aligica (2023, 11), "a democratic system is resilient if political decision-making power . . .continues to be channeled via representative offices accessed by means of fair electoral competition" even when confronted with challenges aiming to undermine the institutions that safeguard such competition.When applied to democracies, researchers study not only their resilience to shocks and crises, but also their ability not to backslide to authoritarian rule (Boese et al. 2021;Merkel and Lührmann 2021).
Research on resilience is not limited to democracies (Dimitrov 2013;Nathan 2003;Ngoun 2022).Moreover, during recent crises, authoritarian regimes have demonstrated levels of resilience much higher than those predicted by researchers and experts (Luhnow and Forero 2023).Modern autocracies demonstrate substantial levels of resilience, undermining the earlier idea that autocracies are not resilient enough due to their lack of democratic sources of resilience.However, as Sinkkonen (2021a, 114) argues, "analytic tools developed for studying democracies are not sufficient to account for the variance of governance relevant variables in autocratic regimes."Krastev (2011) has summarized the arguments used by democratic theorists to demonstrate that the today's authoritarian regimes were unstable.Then, he has very convincingly shown that these arguments (or at least part of them) can also work in the opposite direction as an explanation not for the weakness but for the strength and stability of autocracies.
Indeed, a whole group of autocracies located in different parts of the world -Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and others -have proved remarkably resilient not only to various external shocks and crises but also successfully resisted democratic reforms (Dimitrov 2013).China occupies a special place in research on authoritarian resilience (see, for instance, Gilley 2003;Li 2012;Sinkkonen 2021aSinkkonen , 2021b)).Such "unexpected" authoritarian resilience has generated new interest in authoritarian practices of governance and modern authoritarianism in general (Busygina and Filippov 2023;Hall 2023).
Different types of authoritarian regimes have different abilities to respond to crises.Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2018) distinguish between personalist, party-based, and military regimes.In this group, military juntas tend to be the least resilient, while single-party regimes are the most resilient because of their high level of institutionalization (Nathan 2003;Sinkkonen 2021bSinkkonen , 1175)).Based on their ability to cope with various shocks, personalist autocracies can be located in between military juntas and single-party regimes.In such regimes, the key decisions over personnel and policy are made by one person (Frye 2021, 39).

Coping, adaptive, and transformative capacities of personalist autocracies
Contributions in this volume focus on the resilience of personalist autocracies.Paraphrasing Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013, 8), we define authoritarian resilience as the capacity of the regime to persist in its current form by effectively coping with various disruptions, to adapt to challenges in the future, and eventually to transform in ways that maintain its functioning.The coping capacity of the regime allows it to persist by overcoming immediate threats and navigating through crises effectively (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, 10).At the same time, coping implies not only timely and effective reactions to shocks; it is also about maintaining a level of functionality in routine activities even when faced with challenges (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, 11).Adaptive capacity suggests that a crisis prompts the regime to adopt specific measures aiming at enhancing its ability to respond to similar crises in the future (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, 10-11).Finally, transformative capacity entails the ability of the regime to build institutions that foster its robustness in the face of future crises (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, 11).According to Zakaria (2020), transformative capacity plays an increasingly important role as new crises (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) require an unprecedented pace of change.
Thus, the main distinction between adaptive and transformative capacities lies in the extent of change and the outcomes they imply.Adaptation leads to incremental changes that maintain the current status quo, ensuring resilience of the regime against crises in the future.Transformation is directed toward a radical change, seeking not to merely secure but to strengthen the regime against potential risks in the future (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, 11).Establishing both adaptive and transformative capacities requires the ability of the regime to engage in long-term planning (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, 11).Importantly, these dimensions of resilience can develop quite asymmetrically in authoritarian regimes.For instance, while a regime may demonstrate remarkable coping and even adaptive capacities, its transformative capacity can be incomparably weaker.

The sources and the limits of resilience in personalist autocracies regimes
As in democracies, the main pillar of resilience in autocracies is legitimacy, although it is fundamentally different from that in democratic political regimes.Legitimacy in autocracies seeks to "guarantee active consent, compliance with the rules, passive obedience, or mere toleration within the population" (Gerschewski 2013, 18).Lipset provides a classic definition of legitimacy as "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for society" (Lipset 1959, 86).A non-democratic regime is perceived as legitimate so long as there is a widespread belief among citizens that, in spite of its shortcomings and failures, the system of existing political institutions is better than other feasible alternatives (Morlino 2009).
Modern autocracies apply sophisticated strategies of legitimation.These strategies must be complemented by an optimal degree of repression (actual or threat of repression) to avoid defection (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006), although autocracies today rely less on repression and more on mechanisms of building popular support.Contrary to the widespread belief that citizens in nondemocratic regimes are kept in line through fear, repression, and indoctrination, many modern autocrats actively strive to be well-liked and maintain high approval ratings (Frye 2021).In today's autocracies, a sizable portion of citizens may hold a favorable view of their ruler.Examples of such leaders include Vladimir Putin in Russia, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.Based on available evidence, scholars conclude that these leaders enjoy genuine popularity among their respective populations (Greene and Robertson 2019;Guriev and Treisman 2022).As a result, popular legitimacy aims to secure active consent and compliance with the regime's rules, or at least passive obedience, or toleration within the population.Geddes (2003) explores the ways in which economic factors affect different types of authoritarian regimes and their resilience.Generally, her research demonstrates that as the level of development rises, authoritarian regimes, like democratic ones, become more stable (Geddes 2003).It follows that to be resilient autocracies must show performance legitimacy, that is, economic growth or at least the absence of significant economic contraction even in periods of shocks and crises.Eventually, performance legitimacy produces policies that lead to positive material outcomes: economic growth, poverty alleviation, and quality infrastructure.Informal institutions and patronal networks make positive contributions to authoritarian resilience, strengthening performance legitimacy.
At the same time, we argue that the requirement for the political survival of the incumbent poses a significant constraint on resilience in personalist autocracies.Therefore, the main limitation for authoritarian resilience is the change of the incumbent ruler.This period is fraught with risks for both types of legitimacy, but more so for popular legitimacy.In addition, we suggest that reforms may be a threat to resilience.These reforms can be launched by the authoritarian regime as a necessary condition for maintaining resilience but their spill-over from the economic sphere to the political sphere is possible, and, accordingly, the regime may lose control over the reform process.

Territorial resilience in large and diverse autocracies
Multi-level autocracies, it would seem, should have more difficulties in maintaining resilience compared to unitary autocracies, and multi-level and unitary democracies.These difficulties are associated with additional coordination failures and information manipulation.However, quite surprisingly, this is not the case.On the contrary, the multi-level structure in autocracies allows the regime to maintain popular legitimacy across the entire territory of the country and avoid blame for mistakes and failures by shifting it to lower tiers of government (Busygina and Klimovich 2024).To explain the regime's resilience in the face of the current crisis, contributions in this special issue focus on its territorial dimension.While resilience is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by a single explanation (Sinkkonen 2021b), it is plausible that in vast and diverse countries, territorial resilience is inseparable from the overall resilience of the regime.In turn, territorial resilience can be accessed via two main dimensions.The first implies the ability of the center to maintain control over the entire territory.The second is conditional on the capacity of regional elites to effectively address the challenges arising from the crisis.

Territorial resilience in Russia during its war against Ukraine
As of April 2024, the outcome and duration of Russian aggression against Ukraine is unknown.Thus far, there are no apparent means of achieving a lasting compromise that would be satisfactory to both parties.We argue that there are key premises that have allowed the Kremlin, first, to start the war and, second, to be able to continue it indefinitely.More specifically, given Russia's territorial size and diversity, premises pertaining to territorial politics and the situation within the country's regions were critical.Thus, the Kremlin would not have been able to start the war without being certain that stability across the entire territory of the country would be guaranteed, and regional governors would display full loyalty to the Kremlin.Moscow is also not able to continue the war without material support from the regions.It was in Moscow where the decision to start the war was made, but it is the regions that actually "feed" this war with manpower and weapons.As a result, the internal political and economic situation in Russia, as well as the capacity of the Russian leadership to continue the large-scale war, will largely depend on the resilience of center -regional relations.If Moscow begins to lose political and economic control over the regions, its ability to continue the war will be significantly limited.
Until now, Russia has demonstrated a surprisingly high degree of territorial stability: after the outbreak of the war against Ukraine, no regional governor has shown any sign of deviation from the "official line."And this is despite the fact that the Russian leadership did not elaborate any strategy to prepare the regions for a long war (Busygina and Filippov 2023).Thus far, Moscow's policy failures have not provoked any imbalance in center -regional relations.Was the model of center -regional relations built so well that it proved to be stable even during the war?Has the war changed anything in this model?What is changing at the regional level in the relations between the regional authorities and the population?How do the intra-regional elite networks contribute to regional resilience?Under what conditions can we talk about the possible depletion of the regional (or territorial) resilience?
In this volume we seek to address the above questions as well as the following questions: (a) What are the sources and limits of Russia's "territorial resilience"?(b) How is this resilience maintained in Russia during the self-produced external shock -the full-scale warfare against Ukraine?We explore two dimensions of Russia's territorial resilience: (1) the relationship between Moscow and the regions (and its dynamics after the beginning of the war); and (2) the changing situation inside the regions (governors' rhetoric, regional economies, and elite networks).

Special issue workshop
The collaborative workshop "The Regional Dimension of Russia's Resilience during Its War against Ukraine," held at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study, HWK) in Delmenhorst, Germany on 18-19 January 2024, preceded this collective volume.It put the individual contributions in conversation with each other.All participants came together and engaged in a comprehensive discussion of territorial resilience in Russia.Questions and themes discussed by the participants traveled well beyond the Russian case.Each paper presented at the workshop aimed to make an innovative empirical and conceptual contribution, providing a new framing and/or analyzing original data.Furthermore, selected contributions used novel data sets and employed rigorous and diverse methodology to analyze them.As a result, they have demonstrated that it is still possible to study Russian regions during wartime.

Main empirical and theoretical contributions
The special issue begins with an article by Irina Busygina investigating the resilience of centerregional relations in Russia.She examines how Putin's regime manages to maintain the loyalty of all governors and feed their enthusiasm for the war in a vast and diverse country.Busygina argues that, on the one hand, the "vertical of power," a model of center -regional relations that works for ultimate political centralization, contributes to maintaining territorial resilience.This model ensures political centralization and, consequently, the necessary political uniformity.She demonstrates that this model consists of several formalized institutions, including the selection of governors, the guidance and monitoring of governors by the Presidential Administration, and the interactions of governors with the leadership of the United Russia party.Furthermore, she points out that the model itself is too rigid to be resilient, as resilience requires flexibility.Therefore, she argues that the inclusion of governors in patronage networks, as well as the presence of outliers (Kadyrov in Chechnya and Sobyanin in Moscow) makes the system more flexible and, therefore, resilient.
Stanislav Klimovich further investigates how center -regional relations help the regime to mitigate the negative consequences of the war.He theorizes the strategies of blame avoidance in multi-level personalist autocracies.Using data from official documents and media reports, Klimovich demonstrates that to cope with the negative effects of the war, the federal center resorted to blameshifting by formally and informally delegating to the regional governors several unpopular tasks such as casualty reporting and mobilization.He argues that authoritarian federalism represents an integral part of Putin's consolidated personalist autocracy.It allows the center to maintain the incumbent's popularity by shifting blame for policy failures from the presidency onto other federal political institutions and the regions.
As the war continued, the elites have demonstrated full support of the "special military operation" in texts and speeches.Nikita Khokhlov examines the public rhetoric of Russia's governors.He argues that they vary their communicative responses to the war strategically, depending on their personal considerations and structural characteristics of their regions.Applying text-as-data methods, he analyzes gubernatorial posts on the social network Vkontakte between 2022 and 2023.The results show that governors up for elections, outsiders with weaker political standing, and governors from poorer regions post more about support measures for combatants and their families, as well as humanitarian aid to the annexed territories.Khokhlov argues that such rhetoric emphasizing performance legitimacy helps to co-opt war-affected groups, minimizing the threat of anti-regime mobilization.
Ekaterina Paustyan studies the resilience of Russian regional elites in the face of war.She argues that elite cohesion ultimately elevates their ability to cope and adapt to new challenges.Employing social network analysis of elites' connections in Belgorod Oblast (which has been severely affected by the war), Paustyan demonstrates that the war has had a relatively minor impact on the structure of a regional elite network that has preserved its original characteristics.Furthermore, she detects that the outsider governor has not only managed to strengthen his own position within the elite network but also to reinforce elite cohesion.As a result, the governor has successfully consolidated different groups of elites who have come together to cope with the challenges posed by the war.
In their article, Andrey Yushkov and Michael Alexeev focus on the economic and fiscal effects of the war on subnational governments in Russia.Relying on fiscal and economic data, they investigate the impact of the war on different groups of regions.In particular, Yushkov and Alexeev identify groups of "winners" and "losers" among the Russian regions.The former includes oil-and gasextracting regions, weapons-producing regions, as well as the largest federal cities.The latter consists of the border regions with Ukraine and the regions with sanctions-prone industrial specialization.Despite the unexpected resilience of the Russian economy to a sanctions shock, they highlight negative trends at the regional level that are often overlooked in policy discussions and the literature on economic sanctions.
Finally, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova studies governance-related measures designed by authoritarian governments to maintain public support.Focusing on authoritarian social policy, she measures the political effects of unconditional and conditional cash transfers, with a specific focus on child subsidies.These subsidies have become increasingly integrated into the Russian government's policy arsenal aimed at strengthening political support.She demonstrates that social policies and child support have gained increased significance in recent years, yielding political dividends to the government and bolstering public support.Sharafutdinova argues that this is part of the current social contract enabling authoritarian resilience during the war, made possible by policies at the federal, regional, and municipal levels of government.

Directions for future research
The articles assembled in this special issue unpack the complexities of territorial resilience in Russia and highlight the need for further research into the more long-term political, economic, and societal trends that contribute to this dimension of national resilience now and could affect its level in the future.We think that the concept of authoritarian resilience is both useful and promising in advancing our understanding of the functioning of modern authoritarian regimes.Maintaining resilience during major conflicts in Russia's personalist authoritarian regime is part of a wider trend of authoritarian learning and the promotion of authoritarianism, and for that reason future research would benefit from placing the Russian case in comparative perspective.