SUMMARY:

In his introductory essay, Viacheslav Morozov offers a series of questions on the study of contemporary Russian politics. The key question for the author is the relationship between the structure (political semantic and political culture) and the subject of political action and the ability of the political subject to alter the persistence of conventional modes of political perception and practice. Morozov warns that some analyses of Putin’s policies and political performance may suffer from a distorting lack of distance and thus exaggerate the role of agency in bringing about change in the political culture. Morozov further demonstrates the possible impact of the analysis of the language and “structural” predicaments of Putin’s rule on actual political process, as this optics effectively eliminates the possibility of political and moral judgment.