Introduction

When periods, or phenomena, are designated with a title including the prefix ‘post-’ (postmodern, post-communist, post-industrial) the intention is usually to signal that, although the period (or phenomenon) in question supersedes something now defunct, it has yet fully to transcend its predecessor, and persists in bearing its trace. There is no better illustration of this principle than the arrival in Russia of the period nominally labelled ‘post-Putin’, with the first year of which the publication of this book will overlap. One of the many legacies that Putin bequeathed to his successor was a national media seemingly browbeaten into subservience to the president’s authoritarian, patriotic agenda. But Putin’s ‘achievement’, vital to the path he pursued during his two terms, must be seen against the background of enduring tensions within the vast empire over which he held sway (the Putin period coincided with an alarming rise in inter-ethnic violence and an exacerbation of the social division which he, in his turn, had inherited from his predecessor), economic growth as fragile and oil-dependent as it was dramatic, and the ever-increasing influence of global trends over which he exerted minimal control.