There are several topics that are considered to be “advanced” for this book. We will briefly discuss some (but not all) of these topics to make the readers aware of the fact that the present coverage has precluded them, and then cover three topics in a greater detail.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society has been molded by different ideological forces. Those representing conservative values – understood as a combination of references to the national culture’s exceptionalism, Orthodoxy, and a vague “traditional values” narrative – have historically comprised a plurality, and even sometimes a majority. The Presidential Administration under Vladimir Putin has been capturing that dynamic to its own advantage, trying to secure the political loyalty of these conservative-minded segments of the population and mobilize them in support of the regime. Within this conservative segment, the Russian Orthodox Church has been gaining in influence to the point that it is now Russia’s key ideological entrepreneur, pushing for a “moralization” of society and politics and developing lobbying strategies to penetrate secular state institutions: the military, the school system, and the judiciary. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has dramatically shifted the conservative equilibrium toward justifying mass violence against Ukraine and repression at home.

Over the past two decades, the quest for economic stability and security has become a leading principle of contemporary Russian macroeconomic policies. To understand the genesis of these fundamental building blocks of Russia’s macroeconomic policies, the chapter provides a chronology of key policy choices and macroeconomic developments from the financial crisis of August 1998 to the aftermath of the global financial crisis ten years later. The painful fallout of recurring economic crises, most notably in the 1990s and after the global financial crisis of 2008, has shaped Russia’s recent policy choices in fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. During President Vladimir Putin’s first two terms in office in 2000–08, the Russian government reformed public finances, restructured sovereign debt, and wisely created a Stabilization Fund for a rainy day. These fiscal buffers cushioned the economy against some direct effects of the 2008 and 2014 crisis. Since 2012, it has become clear that conservative fiscal and monetary policies alone are not enough to support economic growth or increase household welfare. The sanctions and trade restrictions that are the result of geopolitical tensions with the West added further weight and urgency to Russia’s search for economic security at the expense of other economic priorities, such as social policy or improving the investment climate.

Russia is a multiethnic and multireligious polity, with a long history of managing ethnic and religious identities and group allegiances. This chapter first briefly introduces the Russian Empire’s multireligious and multiethnic structure before proceeding to the critical transformations of ethnic and religious identities in the Soviet period. Soviet policies promoted and ideologically reformulated ethnolinguistic identities as the building blocks of a multiethnic federation. Soviet official policies toward religion were also a central element of a great transformation that elevated ethnicity and imbued it with socialist content as a primordial social identity, while persecuting and downgrading religious identities. The chapter then addresses the post-Soviet period and the changes in ethnic policies that took place from Yeltsin to Putin. In the Yeltsin years, the pendulum swung between two extremes of ethnic policies, represented by Yeltsin’s call for ethnic republics to “take as much sovereignty as [they] can swallow” in 1990 and his decision to invade Chechnya in 1994. During this period, majority and minority religions experienced a significant revival. After the 2000s, official policies accelerated processes of assimilation, and the revival and salience of ethnic and religious identities are related to domestic power struggles and foreign policy. Putin has used the Russian Orthodox Church in support of his domestic and international political goals in a way no Russian leader has done since the tsars, and he also relied on ethnic Russian nationalism in legitimizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Despite the common perception of Russia as a lawless place where an all-powerful president can do what he likes, or one with corrupt law enforcement and courts that are deeply mistrusted by citizens, Russia is indeed a country of laws. It is governed by a constitution and by laws passed through a bicameral legislature and signed by the president. Courts decide cases, criminal defendants are prosecuted, and businesses and individuals can sue one another when relationships go sour or damages have been done. Legal actors are acutely aware of what the laws say and how they are written and are careful to rely on the text of the law when making decisions. Behind the formal institutions of law, however, also lie informal practices. We often refer to this as the difference between the “law on the books” and the “law in action.” How law operates and is implemented, in other words, often matters more than how the law is written. This chapter will introduce both the formal and informal aspects of law in today’s Russia. These two aspects of the law combine to produce a system that is dualistic. It is both politicized – used to repress opposition and dissent – and ordinary – serving the needs of the average citizen – at the same time. The chapter will also demonstrate the importance of law and the legal system in the consolidation of President Vladimir Putin’s power.

The interpreters in Chapters 1 to 4 are written in C, which has much to recommend it: C is relatively small and simple; it is widely known and widely supported; its perspicuous cost model makes it is easy to discover what is happening at the machine level; and it provides pointer arithmetic, which makes it a fine language in which to write a garbage collector. But for implementing more complicated or ambitious languages, C is less than ideal. In this and succeeding chapters, I therefore present interpreters written in the functional language Standard ML.

Most engineering systems can be described, with the aid of the laws of physics and observations, in terms of algebraic, differential, and integral equations. In most problems of practical interest, these equations cannot be solved exactly, mostly because of irregular domains on which the equations are posed, variable coefficients in the equations, complicated boundary conditions, and the presence of nonlinearities. Approximate representation of differential and integral equations to obtain algebraic relations among quantities that characterize the system and implementation of the steps to obtain algebraic equations and their solution using computers constitute a numerical method.

Typed Impcore and Typed ρScheme represent two extremes. Typed Impcore is easy to program in and easy to write a type checker for, but because it is monomorphic, it cannot accept polymorphic functions, and it can accommodate new type constructors and polymorphic operations only if its syntax and type checker are extended. Typed μScheme is also easy to write a type checker for, and as a polymorphic language, it can accept polymorphic functions, and it can accommodate new type constructors and polymorphic functions with no change to its syntax or its type checker. But Typed μScheme is difficult to program in: as Milner observed, supplying a type parameter at every use of every polymorphic value soon becomes intolerable. To combine the expressive power of polymorphism with great ease of programming, this chapter presents a third point in the design space: nano-ML. Nano-ML is expressive, easy to extend, and also easy to program in. This ease of use is delivered by a new typing algorithm: instead of type checking, nano-ML uses type inference.

From Gorbachev through Yeltsin to Putin, Russia’s media landscape has undergone profound change since the late 1980s. The centralized Soviet system of propaganda collapsed, to be replaced by freewheeling broadcast media that were not fully independent of the oligarchs who owned or controlled them. Vladimir Putin brought these media under his control after assuming the presidency in 2000, but for some time he was content to let information circulate in other arenas. That changed with his return to the presidency in 2012. Since then, and especially since widespread protests in 2011 and 2012, state control of the media has been consolidated and extended in various directions, most especially online. Under Putin, new media have emerged, but they too have been subjected to various sanctions and restrictions. The Russian state has for now perfected its control of the media, with uncertain consequences for the stability of Putin’s rule.

presents applicative programming in μScheme. But μScheme doesn’t just support applicative programming; it also supports the procedural programming style described in . In particular, it provides while, set, and begin. In the procedural style, while and if account for most control flow. But loops typically also use such control operators as break, continue, and return.

Inequality in Russia skyrocketed in the 1990s. The wealthiest businesspeople became oligarchs while average Russians struggled to cover the cost of their basic needs. In this chapter, we examine the rise of inequality in postcommunist Russia, and the role that social services – like healthcare, education, and pensions – played in socioeconomic wellbeing. This chapter details the evolution of inequality and public opinion about economic issues. We show that, with increasing inequality, the provision of social services and other public goods suffered due to the government’s lack of capacity and finances. In the 2000s, Putin ushered in a period of rising oil prices and better economic performance. Inequality has decreased to some degree in recent decades, and the provision of social services has dramatically improved since the early 2000s. After the 2009 financial crisis, a renewed period of stagnation began, and a number of protracted problems in the provision of public goods persist. We discuss some social policy promises that have been unfulfilled in the lead-up to Putin’s fourth election in 2018, and the consistently low level of spending on social services. These unfilled promises matter because they affect everyday realities for many Russian citizens and raise the question whether economic inequality and poor public services may influence regime stability in Russia in the long run. Survey research suggests, though, that poor economic conditions and lacking social services have so far frustrated, but only rarely enraged the Russian public and are unlikely to undermine support for the regime on their own. Whether socioeconomic factors contribute to stability or fragility in Russia today depends on how these issues are utilized by the political opposition.