Environmental politics offers a useful entry point to evaluate the stability and fragility of Russia’s post-Soviet political and economic regime. The politics of the environment in Russia intersects and interacts with a range of other issues – the state’s capacity to enforce its laws; democracy and the ability of citizens to participate in politics; sources of economic growth and the regulation of the economy; inequality; and the diverse cultures of Russia’s multinational society. Russia boasts tremendous ecological diversity and significant protected natural areas, but also faces a number of environmental challenges, not least of which are the effects of climate change. In the post-Soviet period, in an effort to recover from the instabilities of the 1990s, the Putin government developed an economic model based on natural resource exploitation and an increasingly authoritarian form of governance, justifying this system as a means of achieving prosperity and economic security for citizens. Today we see that Russia has strong environmental laws that are not always well enforced. Russians express a high level of concern about environmental issues, but the political climate is increasingly hostile to activism. Russia is also making a big bet on the Arctic region where natural resource extraction is expected to bolster Russia’s future economic prospects and status as a great power, even as climate change and source of environmental degradation threaten Arctic inhabitants, wildlife, and ecosystems.

Does Russia’s working class form a pillar of popular support for the Putin regime? Or are workers and their communities struggling with stagnating standards of living, so that their social and economic concerns might become demands for political change? There is ample evidence to support both views. This chapter will attempt to reconcile those contradictory views regarding labor in Russian politics and society. In doing so, it will point to a substantial dilemma for Russia’s leadership. Seeking to rejuvenate Russia’s slow-growth economy will almost certainly entail hardship for Russia’s workers, which could lead to social protest and political instability. Yet failing to rejuvenate the economy will likely result in prolonged stagnation, which could also lead to protest and instability.

General equations describing transport of momenta and energy by advection–diffusion was given in Chapter 2 (see, also, Example 4.2.3) and will not be repeated here. It is important to note that the entire finite volume formulation is based on local one-dimensional representation in each coordinate direction. The flux crossing a control volume surface is represented using a one-dimensional formulation.

This book is about programming languages—and also about programming. Eachof these things is made better by the other. If you program but you don’t know about programming languages, your code may be longer, uglier, less robust, and harder to debug than it could be. If you know about programming languages but you don’t program, what is your knowledge for? To know a language is good, but to use it well is better.

The dynamics of center–region relations in Russia established by Vladimir Putin over the past two decades are at the heart of both the strength and the fragility of Russia’s authoritarian regime today. This chapter provides a history of changing relations between the federal center, the Kremlin, and Russia’s diverse subnational territories and highlights a central tradeoff that characterizes this relationship. The federal government has to balance two competing imperatives in its relationship to the regions and decide between a higher level of political control on the one hand, and more responsiveness to local needs on the other. The chapter consists of four sections. The first section considers Soviet legacies and political events that characterized Russia’s transition from the Soviet Union. The second looks at Yeltsin’s presidency, which was characterized by empowerment of Russian subnational units and the promises of federalism and democracy, but also extreme weakness of the federal state and threats to Russian statehood. The third section focuses on recentralization dynamics that characterized center–region relations under Putin during his first two terms as a president. The final section considers increasing powers gained by the president in recent years vis-à-vis the regions against the background of persistent issues of regional governance that the regime has been unable to solve. The chapter demonstrates that centralization reforms both strengthened Putin’s regime by establishing a system of control over regional actors and failed to build in the flexibility and responsiveness needed to address local needs.

Institutions that protect property rights, enforce contracts, and resolve business disputes are essential for a market economy to function smoothly. These institutions may be formal or informal, ranging from courts to the reputation of prospective business partners. But in the chaotic transformation from Soviet-era economic planning to a market economy, firms in Russia came to utilize far more extreme strategies for securing property, including services provided by organized crime and corrupt public officials. This chapter traces the evolution of Russian firms’ strategies for protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and resolving business disputes from the early days following the Soviet Union’s collapse through the contemporary Putin era. The focus is on “everyday” Russian firms, rather than on oligarchs, state-owned enterprises, or conglomerates in the natural resource sector. We will see that a central challenge of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation has been to forge state institutions strong enough to prevent chaos and coercion by criminals yet also constrained enough to curtail predation by powerful state officials.

In this chapter we will introduce the FEM as a technique of solving differential equations governing a single variable (or dependent variable). Once we understand how the method works, it can be extended to problems governed by coupled PDEs among several unknowns. In particular, equations governing steady-state heat transfer in one- and two-dimensional problems are used as the “model” equations to introduce the FEM.

Russia’s superwealthy and politically influential elites – or oligarchs – were created during the privatization of the 1990s. After Putin came to power in 2000, he subordinated the oligarchs to the state: The oligarchs could keep their fortunes as long as they supported the Kremlin’s priorities. Under Putin, state procurement became the new engine of oligarchic enrichment. Three types of oligarchs can be distinguished today: Putin’s friends, the silovarchs, and the outsiders. As a whole, the oligarchs seek more predictability from the Kremlin and more security for their assets – but they do not necessarily desire democracy or the rule of law proper. The oligarchs cannot force the Kremlin to guarantee their property rights due to the internal divisions among themselves, as well as the Kremlin’s complete control of coercion. While several oligarchs have also attempted to push for democratization, they have mostly failed. Internationally, the oligarchs present the West with several challenges, including the projection of Russia’s political influence abroad and Russian money-laundering in the West. Finally, a comparative and historical perspective suggests that oligarchs have good reasons to fear democracy, but this fear can be overcome. Yet, in the Russian context, the gap between the oligarchs and the population at large will remain dramatic.

Because this book is concerned with the numerical solutions to problems of heat transfer and fluid mechanics, it is useful to summarize the governing equations of these two fields, which are closely related. Subject areas as diverse as aerodynamics, biology, combustion, geology and geophysics, manufacturing, and meteorology can be studied using the equations governing heat transfer and fluid mechanics (for detailed discussion of the underlying physics and derivation of the equations

This chapter examines the workings of Russia’s superpresidency. It explains how Russia’s executive branch of government arose out of the politics of the early 1990s, and it shows the ways that it has evolved since then. Russia’s constitution grants the president a wide range of responsibilities and prerogatives, many more than we usually associate with a presidential system of checks and balances. This chapter elaborates the formal powers of the president and explains what makes a “superpresidency” different from other types of political executives. The constitutional powers allocated to the president are only one part of how authority functions in Russia, however. The personal characteristics of the individuals who have occupied the office, their leadership style, and the political context in which they operate have also all shaped how the superpresidency works in practice. This chapter introduces the concept of Vladimir Putin’s “vertical of power” in order to understand how decisionmaking authority has been consolidated in the office of the president over the past twenty years. Finally, we will see how Putin has managed to circumvent presidential term limits to extend his time in office. It concludes by highlighting the sources of stability and fragility within the superpresidency. With a very powerful executive and a strong vertical of power, Russia’s political system has become highly personalized around the figure of the president. Consequently, the stability of this system will depend in large part on the president’s ability to maintain the support of political elites and Russian citizens as he fights a costly war and needs to respond to increasingly painful sanctions.

In the nineteenth century many poets viewed their craft as analogous to science, employing similar methods to reach similar conclusions. Victorian poets engaged with science on a number of different levels: they wrote about scientific ideas, employed scientific methods like empirical observation and induction, and sought to verify scientific truths. They also were keenly aware of what poetry could offer that science did not: an insight into human nature and moral truths. In response to scientific theories that upended accepted beliefs about the world and humanity’s place within it – geological uniformitarianism, evolution and natural selection, sexual selection and the coming heat death of the universe – poets like Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith, Constance Naden and May Kendall conducted poetic experiments in human nature, testing the impact of groundbreaking scientific theories on human society and behaviour. In so doing, they advocate for productive exchange between science and poetry, but also champion poetry’s unique remit.