Public interest in Russia and China has increased in the last decade, and experts on their politics are often asked to explain current events. Who are the members of these expert communities? What are their social structures? And can the public trust them? After all, experts on authoritarian regimes did not anticipate either the fall of the Soviet Union, or the emergence of the so-called Arab Spring. As China and Russia close themselves off and information from the ground becomes more difficult to access, should we be worried that experts will turn to their peers for information instead, which may lead the community to fall prey to echo chamber effects? Over the last years, we have used a snowballing nomination process to collect information on over 2500 China experts, surveying more than 600 of them. We have used the network of nominations to analyze the social structure of this community. Our research revealed that male academics who are both US-based and US-educated continue to form the core of this community, but younger cohorts appear to be more diverse in terms of educational background, gender, and geographic location. We also found network structures that may be conducive to echo chamber effects: experts tend to nominate peers with the same geographic and professional background as themselves, and – for a small subset that signed two opposing open letters – those who provide similar policy advice. This paper presents preliminary findings from a similar and ongoing survey of more than 1000 Russia experts. In contrast to the China experts survey, we have also asked respondents to assess Russia’s current political and economic situation, allowing us to measure more directly whether experts tend to recommend those who share their views. Comparing the network structures of the two communities will also allow us to better distinguish features and structures inherent in expert networks from characteristics typical for one of the two communities: in particular, we will explore if the US plays a similar important role for the location and education of this community, and examine the diversity of Russia experts in terms of their gender and geographic location. We want to know if the Russia watcher community has a similar global reach across all five continents, and how experts within and outside academia are connected and represented in that network. Finally, we are curious if the geographic and professional sub-communities differ in their assessments of Russia’s political and economic situation.

In what ways do interstate wars affect authoritarian elite coalitions? One common explanation is that leaders need cohesive coalitions of elites with the resources and skills necessary for sustaining war and governance. However, empirical research on elite dynamics during wartime is limited due to data constraints. We hypothesize that if elite cohesion is necessary for dictators to wage war, then major shifts in elite circulation, such as increased exits, blocked promotions, or lateral reshuffles, may expose vulnerabilities in the regime or indicate strategies for maintaining control under wartime pressure. To examine these dynamics, we compiled an original dataset of all deputy ministers and deputy heads of federal executive bodies in Russia from May 2018 to April 2024. While not part of Putin's inner circle, these 700 officials are essential to the daily management of Russia's civilian, security, and military sectors. We coded their biographies to capture sociodemographic data, career trajectories, previous positions, exit fates, security backgrounds, and personal sanctions. We applied a Regression Discontinuity in Time Design (RDiT), using the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, as the cutoff. Our dependent variable categorizes exit fates into three types: successful rotations (promotions); lateral rotations (movement to other positions within the system but outside the federal executive and major companies); and rotational exits (criminal cases, retirement, death, or disappearance from public view). Preliminary findings suggest the invasion triggered a noticeable discontinuity, with rotational exits and lateral rotations increasing considerably. However, these effects diminish over time. Meanwhile, the likelihood of a successful rotation into a top position ("promotion") steadily decreased as the war progressed, suggesting that access to elite positions in the Russian neo-nomenklatura has narrowed, at least according to our data as of mid-2024. Multinomial regression models with time-trend interactions confirm these patterns when controlling for other relevant factors. These findings contradict earlier research on the resilience of authoritarian regimes during wartime. Instead, they imply that Putin's regime has absorbed the shock of war by managing elite circulation – moving officials laterally to maintain control while limiting upward mobility. While this strategy may sustain short-term cohesion, it could generate long-term vulnerabilities as bureaucrats find fewer pathways to advancement. This article contributes to the literature on authoritarian resilience, elite politics, and the domestic consequences of interstate war.

This paper develops a comparative framework for analysing how brokerage shapes the adaptive capacity of authoritarian political economies under external pressure. Drawing on original network data on Russian elite actors, it identifies and empirically traces three distinct sectoral modes of adaptation brokerage through which state-linked elites mediate engagement with the global economy: technocratic–financial brokerage (Kirill Dmitriev and the Russian Direct Investment Fund), technological outsider brokerage (Arkady Volozh and Yandex), and personalist resource brokerage (Igor Sechin and Rosneft). Methodologically, the paper combines large-scale text mining of Russian-language media, quantitative social network reconstruction, descriptive statistics, and process tracing to map the evolution of these brokerage networks across the pre- (2010–2013) and post-Crimea (2014–2020) periods, the COVID crisis (2020–2022), and the war period (2022–2025). This design enables systematic comparison of how sectoral position, political embeddedness, and network structure condition adaptation outcomes under escalating geoeconomic constraints. The comparison reveals pronounced variation in adaptive trajectories. Dmitriev’s financial networks exhibit high flexibility, repeatedly repurposing institutions for new economic and diplomatic functions under sanctions. Volozh’s globally integrated tech networks prove fragile, collapsing once foreign exposure collides with domestic repression. Sechin’s resource-based networks display durability, leveraging entrenched rents and personalist ties to secure continuity, albeit with limited transformative capacity. By linking brokerage type to adaptive outcome, the paper challenges monolithic accounts of authoritarian resilience and demonstrates that adaptation rests on a differentiated portfolio of sector-specific brokerage strategies. It thus foregrounds cross-border and domestic networks as critical infrastructures of authoritarian adaptation in a fragmenting global order.

In recent years, Russia has transformed from an "informational" or "modern" authoritarian regime that relied mainly on persuasion, propaganda, manipulation, and targeted repression, into an authoritarian regime that resembles classical "fear dictatorships". While the transformation is arguably still not complete, repression has increased dramatically, particularly in the preparation and the aftermath of the country's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In this process, the regime's propagandists have reached new heights of aggressive and vulgar language to attack the country's alleged enemies inside and outside the country. At the same time, the regime has attempted to maintain an impression of normal life and prefers to portray the war as a "special military operation", conducted by professionals, that ordinary citizens have little contact with. The starting point of this paper is therefore the diagnosis of the parallel existence of aggressive radicalization and "pacification" (Vlasova 2024). In this study, I ask (1) whether this pattern can be traced in public language of state media and the Kremlin's propagandists, (2) whether there is evidence of it spreading to other parts of the population, or (3) whether indeed the regime reacts to societal discoursive shifts as much as it shapes them. To this end, I use methods of text analysis on a large data set compiled from state-owned or state-controlled media and from social media between 2010---the year before the post-electoral protest wave that startled the regime---through 2025. The focus of the analysis lies on the way in which violence in general and state violence in particular is depicted, legitimized, and aestheticized. I hypothesize that the public has been increasingly subjected to depictions of violence since the regime's interference in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, peaking after the full-scale invasion, and that this led to a normalization of violent language in online public discourse. At the same time, I expect this trend to be continuously broken by attempts of the regime to create an impression of tranquility.