Lilia Shevtsova

Carnegie Moscow Center. ROSSPEN, 2010

In her new book “The Lonely Power. Why Russia Has Not Become the West and Why the West Is Difficult for Russia” Lilia Shevtsova, senior associate and chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions program, engages in a running polemic with Russia’s behavior on the world stage, its relations with the West, and traditional views on relations between Russia and Western civilization.
What role has the West played in Russia’s transformation? How does Russia’s internal evolution affect its relations with the West? How do Russian and Western observers view Russia and the West? These are several of the questions that Shevtsova seeks to answer in her book. Breaking down Russia’s recent history into several stages, Shevtsova examines the foreign policy actions taken by the Russian authorities from the angle of “whether they serve the demands of the country’s modernization, or whether their purpose is to preserve the status quo, which in today’s circumstances means stagnation.”

Press release

Enormous societal and political shifts 20 years ago opened prospects to a new, united Europe and put an end to the Cold War and the nuclear standoff. Despite Russia’s enormous role in this peaceful break from totalitarianism, the country’ course in the subsequent two decades was not so straightforward. The soon-to-be-published book project focuses on the results of Russia’s and other post-communist nations’ transformations, comparing Russia’s experience with that of the Eastern European states.
The book’s authors, who include leading Carnegie Moscow Center experts, pose the question: what was the reason behind Russia’s stalled reforms? They lay out the argument that a policy that leads to dismantling of civil liberties in the country and uses strong-arm tactics externally has no prospects. The demolition of the Berlin Wall is no guarantee of success, but democratic transformations are a necessary precondition for the country’s modernization and an authoritative foreign policy of a modern state, as well as its citizens’ well-being.
The Carnegie Moscow Center’s website has published the first articles of the soon-to-be-published collection.

Press release

A new joint publication by the Carnegie Moscow Center and the Liberal Mission Foundation.
“Path to Europe” is a compilation of materials stemming from a series of discussions arranged by the Liberal Mission Foundation and the Carnegie Moscow Center involving Russian experts and representatives of the Eastern European and Baltic countries that have joined the European Union in recent years. The book explores the reforms these countries have undertaken, the problems they have encountered and how they have addressed them, and their accomplishments to date, as well as the differences and similarities between their reforms and those undertaken in Russia.

Press release