Contemporary Russian political dynamics are shaped by exceptionally strong conservative forces that stabilize a prevailing order, but also contain many sources of potential destabilization and change. By the beginning of 2022, Russia’s political order was dominated by President Vladimir Putin and his loyalists within formal institutions, such as United Russia, and informal networks of power led by political and economic elites. There are no political actors who are both powerful and critical of this order, which has been called “high Putinism.” A majority of citizens supported the concentration of power over the previous two decades and contributed to its consolidation through their beliefs and actions. All major channels of communication are firmly controlled by actors committed to disseminating the value, even necessity, of the current order. This highly centralized political order made it possible for Putin to launch a brutal and wholesale war on Ukraine in February 2022. Over the course of the past decade, three key pillars of support for the political current order and the war have been strengthened: (i) the state’s ability to instrumentalize formal institutions to prolong Putin’s and United Russia’s hold on power, (ii) the fact that the state controls virtually all media outlets, and (iii), finally, the government’s ability to generate relative economic prosperity. The war and sanctions are acutely threatening Russia’s economy, and have led to a crackdown on the last remaining independent media outlets.

Whether or not this political constellation will turn out to be stable or fragile depends in large part on whether citizens continue to support Putin. An increasingly assertive foreign policy toward the West had bought high approval ratings for some years. Despite its virtual monopoly over the levers of power, the Putin government has been increasingly afraid of street protest and has gone to great lengths to silence a small but vocal opposition, led by Alexei Navalny. Discontent stemming from failing institutions, pervasive corruption, mounting inequality, and economic hardship has the potential to undermine the balance between stability and fragility in contemporary Russian politics. The outcome of the war in Ukraine will certainly be a watershed moment, although we do not yet know how the war will end. The future of Russian politics will hinge on answers to the question whether Russian citizens will continue to support the Putin government, even with mounting economic and human costs of the war.

This chapter traces the evolution of the Russian oil and gas sector. We argue that, at least since 2000, Russia’s vast natural resources have been a source more of stability than of fragility for the economy. This is in part due to the distinctive history and role of fossil fuels in the context of a Soviet economy that was designed to be self-sufficient and thus diversified. While this did not prevent economic stagnation in the late Soviet period (1970s–80s) or a steep decline in production during the early years of post-Soviet transition (1992–99), it created the foundations for a petrostate that gradually came to be more resilient and adaptable in the face of fluctuations in energy prices, financial crises, and increasingly contentious relations with the West. Following 2000, while the state played an increasingly assertive role in the oil and gas industry, the government also adopted various measures to limit dependence on resource rents, to reduce vulnerability to sudden shifts in global energy prices, and to increase economic stability in the face of new geopolitical challenges. These included a Stabilization Fund, new budgetary practices to control spending and support other industries, diversification of supply flows and export composition, and intensified investment in new infrastructural projects. While there are now growing concerns over carbon emissions and the technological demands of further exploration, hydrocarbons have been mostly a positive force in the Russian economy. Whether that holds true following the war in Ukraine and the imposition of massive Western sanctions in 2022 remains to be seen.

In your prior programming experience, you may have used a procedural language such as Ada 83, Algol 60, C, Cobol, Fortran, Modula-2, or Pascal. Or you may have used a procedural language extended with object-oriented features, such as Ada 95, C#, C++, Eiffel, Java, Modula-3, Objective C, or Python—although these hybrid languages support an object-oriented style, they are often used procedurally.

Russian citizens view the state simultaneously as their leader and their oppressor. They want their state to be a strong, benevolent, and fair leader, but just as often they feel mistreated by it. In post-Soviet Russia, Vladimir Putin’s government has used the desire of Russians to have a strong and fair state as a leader in order to coopt civil society. It created incentives for civil society organizations to pursue their causes through cooperation with state officials rather than through demanding accountability and confronting the state. Russian civil society organizations face a choice whether to accept such offers and collaborate with the state or not, weighing the benefits and repercussions of both paths. This chapter discusses Russia’s civil society in the context of this choice, separating the “collaborating” and the “resisting” parts of it, considers their role in Russian politics, and demonstrates the forces inside civil society that contribute to the stability and fragility of the Putin regime.

The equations governing flows of Newtonian viscous incompressible fluids were reviewed in Chapter 2. The equations are revisited here, in the Cartesian component form, for the two-dimensional case (i.e., set $v_z=0$ and the derivatives with respect to $z$ to zero).

In the languages we’ve examined so far, when we have a high-level problem like “see if a list contains an interesting element,” we can define a high-level, problem-specific function like exists?. But we can’t yet define problem-specific data; no matter what problem we’re working on, our code is written in terms of representations like numbers, symbols, Booleans, lists, S-expressions, and constructed data. We should hope for better; if we’re implementing high-level actions like “find the rule in the table,” “multiply two 50-digit numbers,” or “stop recording when the event is over,” then our code should be written in terms of abstractions like tables, large numbers, and events. Such abstractions can be defined by the language features described in the last two chapters of this book.

A running μScheme program continually allocates fresh locations. How are they supplied? Memory is limited, and malloc will eventually run out. Memory can be recovered using free, but if a programmer must call free, as in C and C++, they risk memory errors: leaks, locations that are freed multiple times, and misuse of freed locations (so-called dangling-pointer errors). Memory errors can make a program crash—or, worse, silently produce wrong answers. But in languages like μScheme, full Scheme, Java, and JavaScript, which are memory-safe, such errors are impossible. The errors are prevented because the implementation of μScheme, not the μScheme programmer, figures out when it is safe to reuse a location. The techniques used to reuse locations safely are demonstrated in this chapter.

The languages of the preceding chapters, Impcore and μScheme, are dynamically typed, which is to say that many faults, such as applying a function to the wrong number of arguments, adding non-numbers, or applying car to a symbol, are not detected until run time. Dynamically typed languages are very flexible, but on any given execution, a fault might surprise you; even a simple mistake like typing cdr when you meant car might not have been detected on previous runs. And using cdr instead of car doesn’t cause a fault right away: cdr simply returns a list in a context where you were expecting an element. But if, for example, you then try to add 1 to the result of applying cdr, that is a checked run-time error: adding 1 to a list instead of a number. To rule out such errors at compile time, without having to run the faulty code, a programming language can use static typing.

Drawing on feminist and LGBTQ+ scholarship, this chapter discusses the role of gender and sexuality in Russian politics, which has risen in significance over the past two decades. It addresses Soviet legacies of gender and sexual norms in contemporary Russia, the use of homophobia by Putin’s regime, and feminist and LGBTQ+ grassroots mobilizations. Most notably, the chapter shows how the Russian government has instrumentalized homophobia via the infamous “gay propaganda” legislation and the utilization of the concept of “traditional family values.” Domestically, the regime’s application of political homophobia has resulted in a discursive othering of LGBTQ+ Russians, as well as a marked increase in anti-LGBTQ+ violence and discrimination. Internationally, the Russian government’s efforts advance its anti-“Western” stand and allow it to claim leadership in global conservative alliances. At the same time, this regime of repression has resulted in a proliferation of varied forms of feminist and LGBTQ+ resistance, paradoxically becoming a legitimate part of Russian opposition politics. The chapter concludes by discussing ways in which the diverse front of Russian LGBTQ+ and feminist activists have responded to the sexism, heteronormativity, and silencing efforts of the government and mainstream Russian society.

This chapter will discuss how race resonates in Russia, paying special attention to the current developments in racial politics. Contemporary racial politics in Russia is ambivalent and complex. Russian citizenship does not depend on racial or ethnic belonging but on civic loyalty. Nevertheless, despite all the calls for a civil Russian nation, we witness the growing importance of racial discourse, promoting an ethnoracial understanding of Russianness. This chapter examines racialization processes in Russia against the backdrop of a conservative turn in Vladimir Putin’s politics. It shows that deeply rooted legacies of racial thinking and practices continue to inform current conceptions of identity in the post-Soviet space. It then argues that racial issues in Russia should be regarded neither as something extreme and abnormal, nor as a disease infecting only certain political figures and subcultures. It is the racialization of mainstream political discourse in Russia – whether it be left, right, or liberal – that encourages the practices of race and the formation of racial identity, leading to new forms of racial governance. Racialization coexists uneasily with the official policy of antifascism. This dualism characterizes post-Soviet racial public discourse and policy leading to uncertainty about Russian identity and to tensions in Russian politics.