Russia's state system has changed significantly since 1991, but the question of how the country should be governed has not been answered. Russia's constitutional framework is weak and inherently flawed, and the balance of political and economic power between the centre and the regions is ill-defined. In the absence of a firm constitutional settlement, regional elites have consolidated power, restricting the growth of local democracy and frustrating attempts at graass-roots economic reform. This book argues that establishing an effective and regulated relationship between the centre and the...

Activities Incompatible, the third volume of Martin Nicholson's memoirs, covers the years 1963 to 1971, when the author started his career as an analyst of Soviet political affairs in the Research Department of the Foreign Office in London and continued in the Russian Secretariat of the British Embassy, Moscow. In 1971 he took his wife and two children to Moscow for his second tour of duty, as Head of the Russian Secretariat. By this time he had also been appointed one of two official Russian interpreters for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. But the Cold War was still at its height, and...