Andrew Kuchins is a senior fellow and director of the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program. From 2000 to 2006, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was director of its Russian and Eurasian Program in Washington, D.C., from 2000 to 2003 and again in 2006, and director of the Carnegie Moscow Center in Russia from 2003 to 2005. Kuchins conducts research and writes widely on Russian foreign and security policy. He is working on a book titled China and Russia: Strategic Partners, Allies, or Competitors, and coedited, with Dmitri Trenin, Russia: The Next Ten Years (Carnegie, 2004).

Kuchins has taught at Georgetown University and Stanford University. From 1997 to 2000, he was associate director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also served as a senior program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1993 to 1997, where he developed and managed a grant-making program to support scientists and researchers in the former Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1993, he was executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies.

He is a member of the editorial boards of Pro et Contra and Demokratizatsia and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1995 to 2000. He holds a B.A. from Amherst College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

Few dispute that Russia has become more autocratic during the almost eight years during which Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia. Explanations for this political process differ, but agreement about the trend is now widespread. Real debate continues, however, over whether growing autocracy in Russia is good or bad for other valued outcomes, including economic growth, political stability, and the emergence of a capable state, effective at home and respected abroad. On the relationship between regime type and growth in Russia, there is a correlation between democracy and economic depression in the 1990s and then autocracy and growth in this decade. Under the administration of Vladimir Putin, popular perception has been that Russia is more stable and that Russians are happier and better governed than under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Often, Putin's high public opinion ratings are used as evidence of citizen content with the administration. Analysts in Russia and the West also credit Putin with ending anarchy and restoring Russia as a great power.

But this growing myth of authoritarian governing competence in Russia needs to be exposed. The Russian economy has grown in parallel to growing autocracy, but these two processes have little, if anything, to do with each other. Moreover, since Putin's ascendance to the Russian presidency, the country has been governed less well, not better. Across a variety of sources and measures, Russians have clearly become less secure as evidenced by a steady increase in murder rates, theft and burglary and terrorist attacks at the same time that the state has become more corrupt. When these negative governance trends are factored into predictions about long-term stability, Putin's governing legacy may not be as positive as assumed. If governance measures remain low under Putin's successor, and in the absence of Putin's personal prestige in the presidency, Russia may yet witness another period of political instability.

Jeffrey S. Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, and has also been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. He has written extensively in the fields of European politics, transatlantic relations, and political economy. His publications include various books and edited volumes, including Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century (Cambridge 2007) Comparative Politics: Interests, Identities, and Institutions in a Changing Global Order (Cambridge, 2000, 2005), and The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, (Chapel Hill, 1997). Recent scholarly articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Theory and Society, Political Theory, German Politics and Society, Slavic Review and The Washington Quarterly. Jeffrey Kopstein's research has been supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The National Science Foundation, and the National Council for European and Eurasian Research. In 2006 he was the recipient of the University of Torontos Faculty of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award.