Bibliographic record
Abstract
Richard Sakwa. Putin: Russia's Choice. London: Routledge, 2004. 306 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index.In a short period of time, Vladimir Putin has made a strong imprint on Russia's political life. Elected in 2000 as the Russian Federation's second president, he has overseen a period of major reforms, in areas as diverse as taxation, social welfare, and federal relations. Where his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had the image of a confrontational and erratic presence, Putin appeared to be a disciplined, focussed leader. This solidity is key to understanding the man's success: according to Sakwa, Putin's popularity owes to his ability to project authority while still appearing to share the typical upbringing of the average Russian citizen (p. 249). Putin's appeal to his fellow citizens is often baffling to Western observers, who remain divided over many questions: is Putin an innovator, or a restorer of some of the most unsavoury features of the Soviet past? Is he reversing democracy or establishing rule of law?Clearly, it is impossible to remain indifferent on the subject of Vladimir Putin. As such, Richard Sakwa's book is a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of present-day Russian politics. Although the work contains biographical information-the first chapter is a fascinating account of Putin's rise to power-it is not strictly speaking a biography. Rather, the book is an examination of the principal reforms, changes and debates in Russian politics from Putin's ascent to power as prime minister in 1999 until the end of his first term as president in 2004. Sakwa's analysis is grounded on the assumption that Putin the individual has been the centre of the country's political landscape and that his world-view decisively shaped reforms. As a result. Putin: Russia's Choice is a book that is a useful general reference work as well as a valuable interpretive statement on the significance of Putin's leadership. Drawing on extensive analysis of Russian-language published sources, the book presents a nuanced and critical perspective on its subject. The book stands out in its consideration of the role of ideas in Russian politics, and for its attention to the particular ways in which Putin uses language. Where much of the contemporary literature on Russian politics focuses on elections, policies, and institutions, a work that considers discourse is a welcome change.Putin's commitment to normality particularly sparks Sakwa's interest (pp. 40-43). As Sakwa claims, historically, Russia's leaders have all too often favoured swift upsets of the status quo over the mundane enterprise of correcting the defects of day-to-day governance. Thus, according to Sakwa, Putin's stated attempts to bring coherent, efficient leadership to the state, and to achieve change through legislation and policy, demonstrate a decisive change for Russia. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".