The Weimar/Russia Comparison Revisited

Abstract

Abstract Just over a quarter-century ago, the authors published a widely read essay comparing Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia in historical perspective. After Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine, comparisons of Vladimir Putin’s regime with Nazi Germany are once again tragically relevant. Reexamining our arguments from 1997 shows the continuing relevance of the variables we emphasized in that essay: the burdensome legacies of the past imperial regime, intense international pressure to marketize post-Soviet Russia’s statist economy, and Russia’s weak party system. Three main issues in our earlier article, in retrospect, required greater development: pinpointing the time span needed to assess regime change, distinguishing mobilizational and patrimonial forms of ‘anti-liberal statism,’ and exploring more fully the foreign policy options for would-be defenders of the liberal global order facing powerful revanchist challenges. We conclude that this sort of ‘replication’ of earlier research should be encouraged more often among political scientists adopting the comparative-historical approach.