Vladimir Putin’s hold on power in Russia has been durable, and the Russian president remains popular despite years of economic stagnation and mounting concerns about elite corruption. Bryn Rosenfeld’s The Autocratic Middle Class and Putin v. the People by Graeme Robertson and Samuel Greene offer two distinct explanations for this conundrum. Central to Robertson and Greene’s account is the claim that Putin’s authoritarianism rests on a fragile equilibrium of state domination and citizen consent, which differentiates it from the “hardcore authoritarian regimes” in other post-Soviet countries (such as in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan). The Autocratic Middle Class, on the other hand, offers a general account of the role that the authoritarian middle class plays in autocratic regimes through an empirical analysis of 28 postcommunist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with particular attention given to Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Rosenfeld does not distinguish between different types of authoritarian regimes: Russia and all five Central Asian Republics are classified as autocratic, whereas Ukraine is classified as a country that “wavered on the cusp of democracy” (p. 9). The two books not only rest on different modes of analysis but also offer a different take on why we should care about Putin’s hold on power. One explains contemporary Russian authoritarianism while also briefly considering the relevance of the analysis to other countries; the other addresses a shared aspect of autocratic rule in the postcommunist region and beyond. They also reach different conclusions, which are, I argue here, best read in conjunction with one another rather than with a mindset that seeks to determine whether one or the other is correct.

Despite their differences, discussed in more detail below, The Autocratic Middle Class and Putin v. the People are both studies of the role that social groups play in authoritarian polities. They make valuable and innovative contributions to the ongoing effort to de-center the study of authoritarian regimes, showing how power is not only produced from above but shaped and even constituted from below. (An early landmark study in this vein was Dylan Riley’s 2010 book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945. More recent contributions include Karrie Koesel, Valerie Bunce, and Jessica Weiss [eds.], Citizens and the State in Authoritarian Regimes: Comparing Russia and China, 2020; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity, 2020; and Natalia Forrat’s “Shock-Resistant Authoritarianism: Schoolteachers and Infrastructural State Capacity in Putin’s Russia,” Comparative Politics 50[3]: 417–49.) The core argument of Rosenfeld’s book is that “a middle class whose status depends on public employment for an authoritarian state is often antithetical to democracy” (p. 5). This theoretical claim rests on the book’s main empirical finding, which reveals differences in middle-class attitudes toward democracy in two types of postcommunist countries: democracies and autocracies. Rosenfeld ultimately argues that “under autocracy, the effect of socioeconomic status on democracy support is conditioned by the individual’s relationship to the state” (p. 81). The main strength of Rosenfeld’s book is that the author makes a compelling case that a state-dependent middle class is a pillar of autocratic regimes and systematically provides evidence for this claim through several separate investigations. Chapter 5, for example, is devoted to a careful analysis to rule out that middle class attitudes toward the authoritarian state are based on self-selection, investigating whether “more autocratic types show a preference for state employment” (p. 151). She shows that there is “no clear relationship between implicit authorities and the likelihood of entering public administration,” whereas social networks or having a public-sector parent, for example, do matter (p. 152).

Robertson and Greene’s book is an in-depth examination of how the Russian citizenry was galvanized to support Putin’s political order. The book adds what it calls a “bottom-up” perspective to our understanding of Putin’s political order—or “the system,” as they sometimes call it. The state’s control of the media (TV in particular) and its relentless propaganda and “mythmaking” engages citizens and promotes loyalty: “The whole edifice of Putin’s power is reinforced day after day by the actions and belief of millions of Russians across that vast country” (p. 11). This “co-construction” of state and social forces is the crucible of Putin’s popularity and the driving force behind the regime’s durability. One of the many strengths of Putin v. the People is that it portrays support of and opposition to Putin’s order as highly dynamic and contingent. The book’s narrative does a superb job of documenting how encounters between state and social forces have changed over the last 20 years. Robertson and Greene also give readers insight into how citizens are moved to join the opposition, providing examples of individuals such as Nikolai Epple, a Moscow resident who was initially uninterested in politics but eventually joined his neighbors to protest a shady private development that threatened to deface a public park (p. 173).

Both books consequently draw our attention to the citizen’s role in strengthening Putin’s power, which stems, in Robertson and Greene’s words, “from millions of citizens willingly acting as unprompted enforcers of Putin’s power” (p. 11). “Unprompted” is perhaps a misleading adjective here. Citizens are compelled to support Putin due to a range of factors that both books seek to uncover. The crucial and central difference between these two projects rests in their explanations of how this process of prompting works. For Rosenfeld, prompting in this context is essentially a game of carrots and sticks that works via the state’s control of material benefits—mainly jobs and the opportunities to solicit bribes and kickbacks, but also access to high-quality healthcare and advantageous loans from state banks. By contrast, in Robertson and Greene’s account, prompting centers on citizens’ beliefs, sentiments, and emotions rather than on their pocketbooks. Both accounts reject the idea that a preexisting and constant authoritarian mindset or orientation allows Putin to maintain power. According to Robertson and Greene, neither acquiescence and loyalty nor protest are predetermined by some long-established political culture of subservience to an authoritarian state—or conversely, by a commitment to democracy. Instead, they emerge from citizens’ encounters with the ideologies and actions of the state. Rosenfeld similarly argues that preexisting political preferences do not account for the authoritarian middle class’s support of autocracy (p. 68).

If pressed to point to weaknesses, I would say that both books are guilty of the common academic crime of being so focused on demonstrating the relevance of one line of reasoning that they end up neglecting that social phenomena are complex and multifaceted. In Rosenfeld’s material account of citizen motivations, we learn little about the ideological terrain of middle-class politics, and the major themes of Russian politics—nationalism, conservatism, patriotism—appear to be all but irrelevant. Yet, if this group of citizens was really primarily or only motivated by economic incentives and risks, why would the Putin government go through the trouble of creating and maintaining an elaborate propaganda machine? A guaranteed minimum income policy would work much better, if symbolic politics really were as marginal as Rosenfeld’s account suggests. Political symbolism does feature in a few places in The Autocratic Middle Class, but this line of reasoning does not surface in the book’s broader argument. Rosenfeld may also overemphasize the idea that state employment by itself has generated acquiescence. It is certainly true that the Russian state and other authoritarian regimes in the region employ a large share of the population, but it is just as important to note that Russia’s economy combines statism with market-based policies. It is precisely this mixed economy that has tangible comforts for a relatively broad swath of Russian citizens (Susanne Wengle, Post-Soviet Power: State-Led Development and Russia’s Marketization, 2015). The state-sector employees, for example, can rest assured that their wages are paid by the state, but they still enjoy the comforts of a consumer-oriented market economy, which had been so conspicuously absent in the late Soviet period.

Putin v. the People, on the other hand, tends to underplay the importance of material realities. Unlike Rosenfeld, who prefers to leave out the tricky dynamics of emotional and symbolic politics, the citizens in Robertson and Greene’s account do repeatedly refer to economic realities, such as wages, pensions, prices, and inflation. Yet, the book’s theoretical framework does not address these issues, and the authors at times make contradictory statements about whether or not material realities matter. On the one hand, the claim that Putinism delivered Russian citizens “neither prosperity nor security” (p. 199) is central to the book, and economic stagnation in the aggregate, and desperation and dislocation at the level of the individual are seen as probable causes of discontent and triggers for protest (e.g., p. 211). At other times, the book mentions that “Russians were more prosperous than they had ever been” (p. 19). These statements refer to different time periods, of course: the first characterizes the recent decade of slow growth, whereas the second refers to the gains in household incomes and overall economic prosperity during the Putin-Gref era (2000–2008). The book as a whole, however, sidesteps an engagement with the ways in which Russia’s post-Soviet economic trajectory shaped citizens’ attitudes. During its first two terms, the Putin administration was able to forge and shape its image as a guarantor of stability and prosperity, contrasting it with the chaos and poverty of the nineties. Since then, even if growth slowed and households lost purchasing power due to inflation, Russia’s mixed economy has still been able to generate economic realities that are perceived, by most Russians at least, as markedly more pleasant than those of Yeltsin’s reckless market reforms and those prevalent during the Soviet-planned economy. In addition to the drama on the political stage, where any potential opponents are actively sidelined or barred from competing (phenomena that feature centrally in the book), Putin’s ability to claim that there are no alternatives is rooted also in these economic realities.

Luckily, we have two books on hand that present revealing findings about the political dynamics of contemporary Russia—one focused on material realities and the other on the symbolic power of nationalist and conservative rhetoric. In terms of predicting Russia’s future, however, one will find different visions in these projects. In Rosenfeld’s analysis, the political economy forged during the Putin’s administration will most likely stabilize Russia’s autocratic order for years to come. Her analysis does not present reasons to expect that the bulwark of the middle-class support for autocracy will erode any time soon. Robertson and Greene, by contrast, see far more fragility in the personalism of the Putin regime. They, too, afford great relevance to societal acquiescence but, unlike Rosenfeld, believe citizen support is far more fickle and unstable than commonly assumed. Putin’s popularity has been “holding the ship together” (p. 229), but support for the institutional order he created is ultimately fragile, given that Russian society has a mind of its own. In other words, citizens are not completely brainwashed by TV propaganda, just as they are not silenced by their material reliance on state-sector employment. The implication for the post-Putin political order is that the range of possible future scenarios is broad and contingent, in Robertson and Greene’s account, rather than narrow and relatively predictable, as in Rosenfeld’s.