51. See Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, especially chapter 8.
52. See Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy; Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism.
53. See Balint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016).
54. See Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise?, especially chapter 1.
55. See Hale, Patronal Politics, chapter 3.
56. See Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence: A People with a Troubled History (London: Routledge, 2005).
57. For a classical account from this perspective, see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974).
58. For comparative historical analyses, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); North, Wallis, Weingast, Violence and Social Orders; Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011); Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).
59. See Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 567–576.
60. The list of heavily corrupt and completely inefficient leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo (Zaire) (1965–1997) or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe (1980–2017), is quite extensive. Among leaders in post-Soviet Eurasia, Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan (1985–2006), as well as his successor, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedow, who rules the country until 2022, may belong to this category.
61. For a critical account, see William R. Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
62. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128.
63. See Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–187; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States.
64. See Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.
65. See Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeen-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): 803–832; for a theoretical and comparative analysis, see North, Wallis, Weingast, Violence and Social Orders.
66. See Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
67. Among the voluminous literature on the subject, see in particular: Democracy in Decline?, eds. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Broadway Books, 2018); Yascha Mounk, “The Undemocratic Dilemma,” Journal of Democracy 29, no. 2 (2018): 98–112.
68. For a detailed account of varieties of authoritarian regimes, see Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For a comparison of quality of governance in various types of authoritarian regimes, see Nicolas Charron and Victor Lapuente, “Which Dictators Produce Quality of Government?,” Studies in Comparative International Development 46, no. 4 (2011): 397–423.
69. For analysis of these issues in a comparative perspective, see Alexander Libman, Michael Rochlitz, Federalism in China and Russia: Story of Success and Story of Failure? (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019).
70. Dani Rodrik, “The Myth of Authoritarian Growth,” Project Syndicate, August 9, 2010, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-myth-of-authoritarian-growth, accessed September 7, 2021.
71. For this argument, see Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook, especially chapter 3.
72. See William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). The real story that inspired Golding’s novel was just the opposite: teenagers, who serve as the main characters of the book, demonstrated a high capacity and willingness to cooperate for the common good. See Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), chapter 2.