Julie Fedor is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne. In 2010-13, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the Memory at War project based in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge (www.memoryatwar.org). She has taught modern Russian history at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Melbourne, and St Andrews. She is the author of Russia and the Cult of State Security (Routledge, 2011); co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012); and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) and Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (Routledge, 2013). Andreas Umland (ku-eichstaett.academia.edu/AndreasUmland), CertTransl (Leipzig), AM (Stanford), MPhil (Oxford), DipPolSci, DrPhil (FU Berlin), PhD (Cambridge) is a researcher of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics with a focus on the post-Soviet extreme right at the National University of ""Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"" (www.ukma.kiev.ua/ua/faculties/fac_soc/politology/index.php ), and the Eichstaett Institute for Central and East European Studies (http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/forschungseinr/zimos/ ). He is also initiator and co-director a Master`s program in German and European Studies administered jointly by Kyiv`s Mohyla Academy and Jena`s Schiller University (www.des.uni-jena.de/).
A splendid analysis of the changing narrative of 'Putinism' and of the nature of the political thought that lies at the heart of the Putin system ... should be required reading and a starting point for Western foreign policy-makers with an interest in the former Soviet space ... quite simply the best thing I've read on what is driving Russian foreign and domestic policy today. --Dr. David White, University of Birmingham on JSPPS 1,1