ABSTRACT
Introduction In the early 2000s a spectre was haunting Russia – the spectre of authoritarian modernization. By then, Russia had been rambling through regime transition for around ten years. These were not years of economic growth, though – quite the contrary, they were years of a deep and protracted recession which culminated in the economic crisis of 1998. As some vital policy reforms got constantly stalled by interest groups and the Communist opposition in the parliament (Hellman 1998; Shleifer and Treisman 2000), it was only natural to wish that the reforms be conducted with an iron fist.
