ABSTRACT
Russia's political turbulence continued unabated in the year to mid-2013, as Vladimir Putin embarked on his third presidential term. Although Putin has come to personify conservation of the past, there has already been significant change. After making some liberalising concessions to the opposition, the government took a range of reactionary steps to neutralise the threat represented by the wave of protests that had begun in late 2011. Though these moves succeeded in blunting the momentum of the organised opposition, it appeared that the previous social contract between middle-class Russians and those who governed them – the former got prosperity, the latter, a free hand – had been irrevocably breached.
