Public Support for Military Purges in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Russia 2024

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: 

Ilia Nadporozhskii is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on the survival of contemporary authoritarian regimes, with particular attention to dictator-elite relations, the management of ruling coalitions, and politics in Russia and the broader Eurasian region. 

After a brief overview of civil-military relations in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, this lecture presents evidence from survey experiments conducted in Russia. The findings suggest that when these military purges are perceived as the result of a political conflict between civilian and military authorities, some citizens may sympathize with military officers even in the presence of criminal accusations. The lecture will discuss this pattern, and the indication that, despite decades of efforts by both the Soviet and Russian regimes to limit the political influence of the military, the armed forces still retain public support during periods of crisis, and may even act as political kingmakers, as they did in 1953, 1991, and 1993.