The European Studies Council Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies series presents
Yoram Gorlizki,Professor of Politics, University of Manchester:
“Authoritarian Rule of Law: The Soviet Case.”
After the end of the Cold War, it was widely assumed that democracy and the rule of law always moved in unison, with the one automatically reinforcing the other. This built on a legacy from the Cold War which linked Western states with the rule of law and authoritarian states, most notably Marxist-Leninist ones, with its absence. This project will provide the first in-depth analysis of a major policy in a key period of Soviet history to ask whether it might be possible to have a particular form of the rule of law in an authoritarian state. In doing so it builds on and extends a growing body of work on the “authoritarian rule of law” and poses questions— such as “How does a rule of law emerge?” and “What is the role of constitutions in dictatorship?”—which can shed new light on how authoritarian regimes function.
Yoram Gorlizki is Professor and a former Head of Politics at the University of Manchester. His most recent book, Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union, co-authored with Oleg Khlevniuk, was recently named a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2021. An earlier co-authored book, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle won the Alec Nove prize in 2005. He has published in a range of interdisciplinary journals including Economic History Review, The Journal of Historical Geography, the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review and the American Journal of Comparative Law. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2020 and was a British Academy Senior Research Fellow for 2024/25.