The Multiple Non-Transferable Vote (MNTV) system is relatively rarely employed at the national level. This is largely explained by its perceived disproportionality, whereby a party with even a minimal advantage in a district may secure all the contested seats. However, in a number of cases, the outcomes produced by this system prove to be significantly more proportional to the existing balance of political forces. One possible explanation for this apparent variation in the effects of MNTV lies in the dominant model of voter behavior. When voters primarily rely on candidates’ party affiliation, electoral outcomes tend to be more disproportional. By contrast, when voters focus on candidates’ individual characteristics, proportionality increases. Therefore, the dominant model of voting constitutes an important feature of the functioning of the electoral system. This article attempts to test the influence of voting models within the MNTV framework using evidence from the Russian municipal elections, employing an index of the dispersion of votes received by party-affiliated candidates. The empirical basis of the study consists of the electoral data from the Russian cities and intracity municipal formations of Moscow and St Petersburg for the period 2007—2021. The analysis suggests that, in the Russian context, voters tend to gravitate toward a “freer” voting model, as reflected in the predominance of moderate and high levels of heterogeneity in results within party blocs across the vast majority of municipal units. At the same time, since a number of potentially relevant factors that influence variation in the dispersion index fall outside the scope of the analysis, this conclusion requires further verification.
This article examines the concept of ideocracy and its functionality in describing certain phenomena of the Modern era. The author argues that the concept of ideocracy owes its origin to the specific legitimization of the modern political regimes. The main prerequisites for identifying the ideocratic method of legitimization stem from the displacement of traditional types of power legitimization by the “will of the people” with the growing awareness of its inadequacy. Typically, in the era of Modernity, this process occurs with the emergence of various variants of representative democracy. Subsequently, the importance of the ideocratic method of legitimization increases in regimes typically described as totalitarian or authoritarian. The author demonstrates that the concept of ideocracy, in both its early and modern interpretations, proves ill-suited to describing real political regimes. The concept of ideocracy is either too vague and applicable to a wide range of regimes, or too narrow and suitable only for describing certain aspects of totalitarian regimes. Therefore, one can confidently speak not of ideocracies, but of an ideocratic method of legitimization, present in various political regimes of the Modern era. In the contemporary Russia, for a number of domestic political reasons, an understanding of ideocracy that allows to classify as ideocracies both Western democracies and other political regimes is in demand. From this perspective, the contemporary Russian political regime can be considered moving toward ideocracy. However, the relevance of this approach remains debatable.
Justice as fairness, developed by John Rawls, is a distinctive theory of justice envisioned as a synthesis of three independently compelling moral ideals: liberty, equality, and reciprocity. Each of these ideals is expressed in one of the three principles of justice as fairness, among which the difference principle is the most debated and controversial. According to this principle, social and economic inequalities are justified insofar as they improve the position of the least advantaged members of society. Many commentators underscore the similarity between the difference principle and the prioritarianism of Derek Parfit and Richard Arneson, who argued that improvements in a person’s well-being are more valuable the worse off that person is. The article presents a comparative analysis of the positions by Rawls and supporters of prioritarianism, bringing to light several fundamental differences between them. First, whereas Rawls’s theory of justice is deontological, in that it gives priority to the right over the good, prioritarianism represents a form of consequentialism in which the good takes precedence over the right. Second, Rawls’s framework is grounded in reciprocity, whereas prioritarianism is grounded in impartiality. Third, Rawls’s principles of justice are intended to regulate only the basic structure of society and do not establish standards for the rightness of individual actions. By contrast, prioritarianism constitutes a comprehensive moral theory that regulates both social institutions and the actions of individual moral agents. To clarify the fourth and most significant difference, the author compares prioritarianism with maximin utilitarianism, viewed as the approach most closely aligned with Rawls’s theory. This comparison shows that, while prioritarianism allows for inequalities that do not benefit the least advantaged, Rawls’s theory and maximin utilitarianism deny the possibility of such inequalities. The differences identified between Rawls’s theory and prioritarianism do not imply an insurmountable divide between them. Nevertheless, taking these differences into account can be highly useful in discussions of these positions, including for those who are not inclined toward either of them.
This article examines the dynamics of recruitment channels within the regional deputy corps of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The empirical basis of the study consists of two biographical datasets containing information on deputies of the communist factions in the legislative bodies of the regions of the Russian Federation as of January 2011 and May 2025. The analysis yields several key findings. First, the embeddedness of CPRF deputies in the political nomenklatura of the Soviet society has substantially weakened, largely due to the natural turnover of older cadres. Second, one of the most significant trends is the growing prevalence among deputies of the legislative experience from the regional and local levels, which is likely associated with the increasing partisanization of elections and legislatures (by contrast, the share of deputies who previously served in the State Duma declined to a minimum). Third, in terms of career, the regional legislative corps of the CPRF is still remarkably separated from the administrative apparatus, with the bureaucracy playing only a minor role as a direct source of deputies. Fourth, the legislative elite of the CPRF demonstrates a persistent degree of plutocratization: while the proportion of deputies directly originating from business has changed little, the presence within party factions of individuals with experience in key positions in the commercial sector at various stages of their careers has increased, largely reflecting the entry into legislatures of individuals who built their careers under market economic conditions. Overall, although the personal composition of CPRF factions has undergone renewal, several important recruitment patterns display continuity, indicating the institutionalization of the party’s legislative elite. At the same time, notable shifts are evident in the socio-professional background of deputies, driven by a range of factors, including changes in the structure of political opportunities.
This article is devoted to the thematization of conceptions of freedom (la libert & agrave;) in the political teaching of Niccol & ograve; Machiavelli. Drawing on a close reading of the Florentine thinker's works The Prince and Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, the author concludes that Machiavelli's concept of freedom does not have a single meaning, but rather several fundamental ones. Among these, the "freedom to live in security" (la libert & agrave; per vivere sicuri) and the "free life" (vivere libero) are of particular importance. An analysis of these notions shows that they are closely connected with the collective symbolic representations held by the people regarding a desirable way of life and the means of attaining it. While the ideal of a "safe life" (vivere sicuro), which Machiavelli interprets as a universal imperative for the existence of the people within a state, presupposes personal safety and the freedom to dispose of one's property, the broader and more elevated ideal of a "free life" in a well-ordered republic enables citizens to enjoy participation in political affairs and public debate, to hold public office, and to receive honors. The article demonstrates that understanding freedom as the capacity of citizens to take an active part in resolving the common concerns of their state constitutes an essential feature of the classical republican tradition, whereas its interpretation as security would later become the dominant conception of civil liberty in the political thought of the European modernity.
The article evaluates the impact of redistricting on voter turnout in elections to regional legislative assemblies in Russia, interpreting changes in single-member district boundaries not as a binary event but as an intervention of varying intensity in the local electoral neighborhood. Using panel data on polling stations for 2014—2023 across 18 regions, the study constructs a measure of “electoral environmental reconfiguration” — the share of polling stations in the new district that did not belong to the same district as a given polling station in the previous election. The empirical strategy relies on a difference-in-differences design with polling station fixed effects and region-year interactions, which allows the model to control for time-invariant polling station characteristics and major region-specific shocks of the period, identifying the effect from within-panel variation. The results reveal a robust negative relationship between the intensity of reconfiguration and turnout: specifications using a continuous treatment measure remain statistically significant after clustering standard errors at the district level, whereas a binary indicator of boundary change itself does not. Discretizing intensity into tertiles uncovers a pronounced nonlinear effect: turnout decline is concentrated within polling stations with high levels of the reconfiguration of their electoral environment and amounts to roughly three percentage points, while low and moderate changes do not produce statistically distinguishable shifts in participation. Placebo tests on the pre-reform period (2009—2018) do not detect persistent pre-trends once clustering is taken into account, supporting the validity of the identification assumption. Overall, the findings refine our understanding of the institutional determinants of electoral participation and indicate that the political consequences of redistricting depend primarily on the scale of reconfiguration of the local electoral space.
The article analyzes the discourse on migrants as a form of political discourse. The authors focus on the process through which a social group of migrants, initially not perceived in political terms, is endowed with a set of political meanings. The case on the basis of which this process is considered is the formation and transformation of the semantic complex denoted by the term “foreign migrant” within the territorial community of the Russian Far East in the postSoviet period. The article describes how the concept of the “yellow peril,” present in the Russian political discourse since the imperial period, was reproduced and transformed in relation to new migrants from the People’s Republic of China in the 1990s, becoming an important element of the regional identity. The authors demonstrate how and why, following a decline in the flow of Chinese migrants, this semantic complex was extended to a new ethno-social group, which was incorporated into the political discourse as a hostile “other”. They also trace the mechanism through which political meanings are attributed to a group that initially lacked political salience. The empirical basis of the study consists of three series of unstructured interviews with residents of the Khabarovsk Region conducted at different stages of the post-Soviet period, as well as materials from the most popular and authoritative regional online media outlets. In addition, the authors draw on scholarly works examining migrant discourse in the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods and analyzing the representation of migrants in post-Soviet federal media.
This study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of two key foreign aid programs — the Marshall Plan and the Washington Consensus — through the prism of the evolution of the political and economic theories. The author documents significant differences in the assessments of these initiatives: while the Marshall Plan is viewed by experts as a predominantly successful example of long-term economic recovery and political stabilization of Western European countries after World War II, the Washington Consensus, implemented in the 1980s—1990s, is more often associated with negative shock effects and institutional failures in the developing countries. Such differences in assessments can be largely explained by the changing paradigms of foreign aid — from economic goals in the post-war period (GDP growth, production restoration) to complex tasks of institutional development and social equality at the end of the 20th century. The Marshall Plan, in line with the utilitarian criteria of its era, achieved its stated goals, while the Washington Consensus did not live up to expectations. Its failure resulted from a contradiction between its declared objectives (market reforms, openness to international trade, and the development of democracy) and its actual outcomes (rising poverty, the concentration of property, and economic and political crises). The study uncovers a cyclical pattern in the development of political and economic ideas — from the Keynesian model of active state intervention in the economy in the 1930s—1950s, to the neoliberal paradigm of the 1980s—1990s, and back to neo-Keynesian approaches following the crises of the early 21st century.
The main goal of this article is to prove the statement that a powerful neopatrimonial trend constitutes a key tendency of contemporary political development, having intensified amid the broader crisis of Western liberal democracy and the growing political radicalism and extremism observed in many developing countries. Under these conditions, the vector of political development has shifted toward the “center”, giving rise to such political phenomena as “Trumpism” and a number of closely related phenomena. Having reviewed the existing approaches in the scholarly literature to defining the concept and essence of neopatrimonialism, the author turns to an analysis of changes in the political culture of contemporary societies that may either facilitate or hinder the development of this trend. To address this task, the author conducts a comparative analysis of political attitudes germane to the populations in countries with different political systems and representing diverse world regions. Empirically, the study draws on the data from the fifth (2005—2009) and seventh (2017—2022) waves of surveys conducted within the international World Values Survey project. The research proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, the author systematizes the relevant data, presenting it in the form of the summary tables. In the second stage, the countries under study are divided into several groups depending on the intensity and specific manifestations of the neopatrimonial trend, with the results compared to findings from the global studies indicating a rise in conservative orientations within the political culture of many countries worldwide. The analysis demonstrates that the cultural shift observed today cannot be interpreted as a mass demand for authoritarianism. Rather, the strengthening conservative turn and the rise of authoritarian populism are manifestations of a powerful neopatrimonial wave currently affecting diverse countries and regions across the globe.
The Russian Federation - understood as an empire (or a "state-civilization") - is starting to reproduce the same center-periphery structure that characterized both the Russian Empire and the USSR. This loose administrative-territorial arrangement was partly justifiable during the era of the expansion of the Russia state, when the state encompassed vast territories inhabited by non-Russian and non-Orthodox populations. The presentday Russian Federation (Great Russia / RSFSR) functioned as the empire's metropole and later as the weak core of the peculiar federal union of Soviet republics that constituted the USSR. The central problem of contemporary Russian nation-building lies in centrifugal (pseudo-imperial and Soviet-style ethno-federative) practices that undermine the former metropole from within. Preserving this model of territorialization and governance within a culturally homogeneous metro-pole objectively generates increasing internal conflict: it politicizes ethnicity, culture, and religions of minorities; replaces a common civic identity with particularistic alternatives; entrenches the privileged status of certain ethno-social groups; and produces double standards in the center's regulation of different territories. As a result, the same centrifugal processes that contributed to the collapse of both the Russian Empire and the USSR intensify. In ethno-national regions, increasingly radical demands for decolonization and compensation for historical grievances are voiced more frequently, triggering conflictual and protest sentiments. According to the author's opinion, contemporary Russia can consolidate only on the tenets of a modern nation conceived as co-citizenship, grounded in the history, language, and culture of the majority. This presupposes the recognition of the state-forming function of Russian identity, which was previously dissolved first in Orthodoxy, then in Sovietism, and finally in the concept of a multinational people. At the same time, the particularistic cultural identities of minorities should be guaranteed the right to support and development on an extra-territorial basis i.e., across the entire territory of Russia, without titular territorial enclaves that, under an unfavorable scenario for Russia, could become new states.
This article examines Russia's quest for national ideology and civilizational identity in response to existential, political, and cultural challenges posed by Western countries. It argues that a prominent current trend in this quest is the critique of Western liberalism, coupled with an appeal to holist categories and to the past. However, this approach entails substantial risks, because it neglects the global trend toward personalization. Personalization refers to the process whereby, as individuals become less constrained by the burden of the material necessity, they increasingly experience themselves as independent and autonomous actors who hold their own views on fundamental issues and seek to express their political preferences directly. The article shows that personalization is associated with declining trust in politicians and institutions of representative democracy, and with the rise of spontaneous and network protests. Such protests - characterized by the absence of hierarchy and the defiance of political mediation - typically destabilize existing regimes while inadvertently creating openings for new, often far less democratic, regimes to consolidate. According to the author's assessment, prevailing Western responses to the challenges of personalization are subject to serious shortcomings. Chief among these is an excessive responsiveness to "loud" minorities at the expense of the "silent" majority. As a result, Russia may have an opportunity to become a leader in conceptualizing these challenges and developing practical policy responses. Doing so, however, would require rejecting a turn toward archaism and instead pursuing a strategy of expanding institutions of direct democracy designed to reflect the interests and preferences of the majority.
Russian political elites aim to form patronal networks and incorporate actors from lower levels of governance. However, "outsider" governors ("varangians"), due to their limited social capital in the regions they lead, face difficulties in building cooperation with local elites. How do non-local regional leaders form patronal networks and incorporate the municipal elite of the regional capital? To answer this question, the author examines two cases illustrating different types of starting conditions for "outsider" governors: a governor with a brought-in team - Gleb Nikitin (Nizhny Novgorod region, 2017-2023); and a governor without a brought-in team - Aleksey Teksler (Chelyabinsk region, 2019-2024). To study the dynamics of patronal network formation, the study employs tools of Social Network Analysis. The research shows that, while using different approaches to constructing patronal networks, "outsider" governors arrive at similar outcomes. They manage to build a cohesive patronal network relying on non-local actors. They also attempt to integrate non-local actors not only into the regional government but also into the city administration, whose staff turn out to be closely connected with regional actors. At the same time, "outsider" governors are compelled to make concessions to representatives of the local elite from the previous governor's team, who strengthen their positions in the informal network by mediating between regional and city actors. This indicates the persistence of regional elite influence within Russia's fairly centralized state.
The article investigates the main characteristics of so-called "new wars", including asymmetry, high percentage of civilian casualties, low intensity, extended duration, blurred and often indeterminate starting points and endings, their indistinguishability from law-enforcement activity, global reach, and connection with identity politics. The author analyzes the applicability to "new wars" of core principles developed within just war theory, such as just cause, proportionality, last resort (necessity), good intention, and discrimination. The author shows that "new wars" generally make compliance with these principles more difficult, yet their moral significance remains intact. At the same time, the author argues that "new wars" exert a certain influence on just war theory. First, they encourage more abstract formulations of the principles of just cause and discrimination. Second, they emphasize that just cause concerns not only legitimate grounds for waging war but also legitimate end goals - goals that cannot be reduced to eliminating the immediate triggers of war, but require addressing its deeper causes. Third, they make us reflect on the idea that reducing the harm of war implies not only refraining from certain actions, but also undertaking active measures. Fourth, they problematize the moral category of complicity in armed conflicts. However, nearly all of these adjustments (with the exception of the first one) rest on the arguments that are relevant not only to "new wars", but also to classical (conventional) wars. Therefore, "new wars" may be viewed as a reason to look at the existing problems within just war theory rather than as a ground for revising it.
The article analyzes the role of Islamist parties in the Arab East beyond the established portrayals of them either as "enemies of stability" or, conversely, as "agents of democratization." The goal is to show how Islamist parties are embedded in Arab party systems and how their interaction with the state is structured. The analysis is grounded in the classic theory of social cleavages developed by S.M.Lipset and S.Rokkan, adapted to the Middle Eastern context. The study argues that durable cleavages in the region run primarily along the "national project - Islam" and "center - periphery" lines, and that these cleavages are exacerbated by factors such as the division of Islam into "official" and "societal" forms and the dominance of the state. Methodologically, the article employs a structured, focused comparison of eight countries (Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Libya) using a most different systems design. The author uses the following four variables as parameters for the analysis: the dominant cleavage, the state's strategy, the party's organizational maturity, and the outcome of institutionalization. Based on the case studies, the author develops a typology of party-state relations: (1) controlled integration, (2) conflictual pluralization, (3) a fragmented system, and (4) repressive dominance. The article demonstrates that these interaction patterns are shaped by the form of religious legitimacy underpinning political authority, the state's strategy of co-opting and/or excluding Islamist parties, and the degree of central state consolidation. The study refines our understanding of trajectories of party institutionalization in the Arab East and offers a transferable framework for analyzing Islamist parties in other world regions.
This article presents the results of an interdisciplinary study of how electoral innovations are managed in the context of the digital transformation of society.The study is highly relevant because electoral processes need to be adapted to changing social realities, where mistakes in implementing innovations can undermine public trust in state institutions. Methodologically, the research study employs a comprehensive approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The qualitative method draws on 13 in-depth expert interviews with representatives of electoral commissions, public authorities, NGOs, and the academic community; the quantitative method relies on a survey (n = 3,000) conducted in Moscow, a pioneering region in innovative electoral technologies. The study yields three main findings. First, remote electronic voting, identified by experts as the most important electoral innovation, does not resolve but rather reproduces the already existing crisis of institutional trust among some people. Its public perceptions are driven by citizens' broader political orientations rather than system's technical characteristics or convenience: loyal voters view it as a useful service, whereas more critical citizens see it as a tool of manipulation. Second, younger respondents, the most competent in digital technologies social group, for whom remote voting was supposed to be a natural extension of everyday technosocial life, exhibit the greatest skepticism toward this mechanism, while older cohorts tend to actively support it. Third, Russia has developed a resilient "trap of institutional distrust": top-down initiatives are viewed with suspicion by certain segments of society, and their aggressive rollout only deepens delegitimization. Overall, the author concludes that rebuilding trust in electoral innovations depends on transforming the management approach rather than on improving technologies themselves. Transformation implies moving away from the logic of innovations "from above" to co-managing them in partnership with civil society institutions.
The article analyzes the paradoxes of studying the upper class in contemporary Russia, which remains an "invisible" stratum within the Russian sociology. The authors identify several key reasons for this: the ideological legacy of the USSR, methodological difficulties, the opaque nature of elites, and the absence of societal consensus on inequality. Drawing on an assessment of stratification models developed by T.Zaslavskaya, L.Belyaeva, O.Shkaratan, and others, the article shows that the Russian sociology long focused on the middle and lower classes while overlooking the upper class. The authors pay a particular attention to the political elite as the principal actor in the formation of a proto-upper class, as well as to processes through which various forms of capital are legitimized and transmitted. They also document the emergence of new research tools - digital methods and big data analytics - that offer opportunities for developing a holistic theory of the upper class. According to the authors' view, contemporary Russia is entering a concluding stage of the transition period, when the upper class is obtaining clear institutional features. This transformation is evidenced in high concentration of wealth, legal formalization of capital transfer, control over strategic sectors of the economy (energy, banking, and digital infrastructure), network-based mechanisms of reproduction (endogamous marriages and "club" membership), and symbolic hegemony i.e., the capacity to define the norms of the social order. The conclusion outlines promising directions for future research on Russia's upper class. Overall, the article contributes to debates on social inequality and proposes new analytical frameworks for studying the Russian elite as a systemic phenomenon.
This article examines the politics of time as an instrument of power manifested in the construction of hierarchies through the category of "modernity." The author analyzes how various political actors employ temporal narratives to legitimize certain practices while marginalizing others. Drawing on a series of cases, the article shows that an appeal to "modernity" functions not merely as a descriptive label, but as a mechanism of exclusion in public rhetoric, economic reforms, and cultural policy. The main argument is that the politics of time relies on normative frameworks rooted in ideas of progress, linearity, and rationality that are historically associated with the Western modernity. However, as the author demonstrates, these frameworks are not neutral: they reproduce global inequality by suppressing alternative temporalities (including the cyclical conceptions of time of particular peoples). At the same time, critiques of Eurocentrism - found in postcolonial theory and decolonial movements - is often based on the same epistemological foundations as the dominant discourse. Even when defying progress, such critiques retain its binaries: the distinction between "oppressed" and "oppressors" is epistemically no different from the division between the "civilized" and the "savage." The article contributes to the discussion on the temporal turn in the social sciences by proposing a reconceptualization of the politics of time not only as a field of ideological confrontation, but also as a space for alternative projects of the future - projects that, while retaining the rational and epistemic foundations of modernity, advance their own interpretations of what it means to be modern.
The collapse of Bashar al-Ass ad's rule has once again brought to the fore the question of the prerequisites for and mechanisms of such a phenomenon as a political regime breakdown, and the participation/nonparticipation of the ruling elite and the state apparatus, especially the coercive "power vertical", in it. In principle, these collective and individual actors (the elements of the system) that constitute the first foundational layer of political authority have a strong stake in regime stability. Yet under certain critical conditions they may remain passive, withdraw, or even side with those seeking to overthrow the government. At the same time, every society includes individuals motivated by transpersonal values - such as their own understanding of duty, loyalty, patriotism, or faith - who may either support the authorities or generate an additional destabilizing impulse. Drawing on an analysis of crises of power in Syria, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan (and incorporating evidence from a range of other cases of both the survival and the collapse of personalist regimes with rigid vertical control), the author identifies the factors that contribute to regime's critical stability. The analysis focuses on elite behavior at critical junctures, when actors weigh expected benefits and costs under two opposing scenarios: maintaining loyalty versus "distancing" themselves from the incumbent. The author concludes that regime instability is almost inevitable when the regime's only support base consists of a narrow circle of beneficiaries and a political clientele willing to defect for personal gain, especially if in danger. The resilience of any government increases when its support base is diversified - above all by expanding the number of pillars on which it rests. A regime can rule without dominating. It is difficult to lose all pillars of support at once when power is horizontally distributed; when some power is vested in local communities, communes, tribes, militias, volunteers, independent parties - in short, when governance is anchored in social structure.
The published work represents a reflection on Konstantin Dushenko’s monograph, devoted to the analysis of a range of concepts that in one way or another refer to political “phobias”. After documenting the indisputable advantages of the book, the author focuses on the problem of the description language that is different from the language of politics. He sees this problem in the fact that social science studies, including political science studies, unlike, for example, natural science studies, cannot afford to completely distance themselves from the material being described, since otherwise what is being described will most likely turn into a figment of a researcher’s imagination rather than the true phenomenon. However, if the language of politics and the language of its description are not separated, the description ceases to be scientific, becoming a political act that increases, rather than decreases, the volume of what is to be studied. The critical review convincingly demonstrates that Dushenko has managed to successfully navigate his narrative between Scylla and Charybdis, and examines the tools that allowed him to cope with this task.
Amid the backdrop of Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States, the reissue of Rodion Belkovich’s book Blood of Patriots: An Introduction to the Intellectual History of American Radicalism appears particularly timely. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the works of religious preachers, Founding Fathers, publicists and scholars, Belkovich demonstrates how the idea of resistance to the centralization of power has been “wandering” from one author to another throughout five centuries, from the beginning of the colonization of North America until Barack Obama’s presidency. Moreover, each of the authors considered corresponds to a certain historical context. As a result, the reader not only obtains a catalog of works that can be labeled anarchist, but also he has an opportunity to feel what events made their authors disenchanted with the idea of state and express their disappointment in journalistic and/or scientific texts. As Belkovich himself admits, he wanted his book to have the effect of a “flash-bang grenade”. According to the reviewer, this effect has been achieved. The book utterly disrupts the established interpretation of the American history. The views of the authors, that Belkovich focuses on, depict in front of the reader an “inverted” history of the United States, where Lincoln is not a great reformer, but a bloody tyrant, where Dwight Eisenhower is a communist stooge, and the New Deal is not a miracle that saved America at one of the most difficult moments in its history, but the final nail in the coffin, where the dream of freedom in the New World is buried.
