Acknowledgments

Many institutions and individuals provided assistance on this project. I apologize in advance for those I forget to mention here and stress that the usual disclaimers most definitely apply - all opinions and errors in the book are my own.

For financial assistance, I would like to thank: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, for a very generous scholarship that got the project started and, among other things, made much of the field research possible; The Smith Richardson Foundation, for a similarly generous grant that supported writing and additional field research, as well as the publication of a policy monograph in which some of the findings from this book were originally presented; The Maxwell School, for several small grants, field research support (through a grant from the Department of State), and support for course buyouts; The University of Oklahoma, for research leave; The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School, for support for a workshop on the first draft of the book.

The most important scholarly community that supported me while working on this project was the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS). Specialists will have little trouble spotting the intellectual influences of multiple PONARS members in the book. I thank especially the founder and director (until 2009) Celeste Wallander. Many members offered feedback, data, ideas, and other support, including: Mikhail Alexseev, Pavel Baev, Andrew Barnes, Doug Blum, Georgi Derluguian, Matthew Evangelista, Tim Frye, Vladimir Gel’man, Ted Gerber, Henry Hale, Stephen Hanson, Ted Hopf, Debra Javeline, Mark Kramer, Ivan Kurilla, Pauline Jones Luong, Sarah Mendelson, Robert Orttung, Nikolay Petrov, Vladimir Popov, Regina Smyth, Vadim Volkov, and Cory Welt.

I thank the participants in an April 2008 workshop at Syracuse University for their comments on an earlier draft. I am particularly grateful to Mark Beissinger and Vadim Volkov for their thoughtful criticisms, as well as Elizabeth Cohen, Audie Klotz, Vlad Kravtsov, David Rivera, Mark Rupert, Azamat Sakiev, and Hans Peter Schmitz.

I thank the Russia and Eurasia Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, especially Marina Barnett, and the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism of Syracuse University, especially Marlene Diamond and Keli Perrin, for help in organizing a 2007 workshop on the policy monograph Russia’s Power Ministries. The participants provided valuable feedback that helped shape this book.

A number of research assistants provided important help with this project over the years: Richard Bodnar, Yulia Ivanovskaya, Katya Kalandadze, Ekaterina Mozhaeva, Tamara Polyakova, Honggang Tan, Tatyana Vinichenko, and Naomi Wachs.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to all of those individuals in Russia who helped me in multiple ways with the research on this project, whether in agreeing to be interviewed, helping find contacts, or reminding me that there is much more to Russia than the state and its siloviki. I particularly thank: Dmitriy Babich, Boris Bednikov, Andrey and Larissa Berkenblit, Olga Dmitriyeva, Irina Dmitriyevich, Zhanna Gumenyuk, Nikolay Kulikovskikh, Irina Kurenkova, Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, Tatyana Nikitina, Nikolay Petrov, Viktor Rudenko, Mikhail Rykhtik, Maksim Shandarov, Vadim Volkov, and Aleksandr Voronin.

Others who contributed in various ways to this project beyond those listed above include: Pablo Beramendi, Matthew Cleary, Boris Demidov, Mikhail Filippov, Dan Goldberg, Petr Kozma, Cerwyn Moore, Robert Otto, Melanie Peyser, Bill Pridemore, Peter Reddaway, Sharon Werning Rivera, Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, Peter Solomon, Jeffrey Straussman, Daniel Treisman, and Alexei Trochev.

Lewis Bateman of Cambridge University Press was, yet again, a model of efficiency in shepherding this project from manuscript to book, and I thank him for his support. Others who contributed to the production process at Cambridge were Emily Spangler, Anne Lovering Rounds, and Mark Fox. I thank Kavitha Lawrence and Newgen for their management of the copyediting and production process, and Nancy Peterson for compiling the index. David Cox produced the two maps used in this book with great skill and efficiency. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and detailed comments.

I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to use portions of previously published articles or book chapters in revised form in this book:

Comparative Politics, for: “Force and Federalism: Controlling Coercion in Federal Hybrid Regimes.” Comparative Politics, 39, 4 (July 2007), pp. 421-440;

M. E. Sharpe, for: “Putin’s ‘Historic Mission’: State-Building and the Power Ministries in the North Caucasus.” Problems of Post-Communism, 54, 6 (November-December 2007), pp. 3-16;

Rowman & Littlefield, for: “Russia’s Regions and Law Enforcement.” In Peter Reddaway and Robert W. Orttung, eds., The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal-Regional Relations, Volume II (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 65-90;

Taylor & Francis, for: “Law Enforcement and Civil Society in Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies, 58, 2 (March 2006), pp. 193-213.

My final acknowledgments are to my family. I thank my wife Renee de Nevers for her love, encouragement, and sense of humor. Renee is also an academic, which means I am doubly grateful for her willingness to take time away from her own research and writing to tell me how to fix mine. I thank my sons Anatol and Lucian, whose obsession with sports, Star Wars Legos, and general mayhem made it possible for me to finish this book, and whose smiles, hugs, and laughter brightened the times I wasn’t working on it. Finally, I thank my parents, Lois and Merlin Taylor, for decades of love and support. I’m sure that they had no idea when they were raising me that I would become keenly interested in Russian siloviki, but I’m quite certain that they would have loved me anyway. I dedicate this book to them.