80. See Vladimir Fedorin, Doroga k svobode: besedy s Kakhoi Bendukidze (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2015).
81. For the self-presentation of Georgian reformers, see Nika Gilauri, Practical Economics: Economic Transformation and Government Reform in Georgia, 2004–2012 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For a more critical account, see Lincoln Mitchell, “Compromising Democracy: State Building in Saakashvili’s Georgia,” Central Asian Survey 28, no. 2 (2009): 171–183.
82. For an in-depth analysis, see Ketevan Bolkvadze, “Hitting the Saturation Point: Unpacking the Politics of Bureaucratic Reforms in Hybrid Regimes,” Democratization 24, no. 4 (2017): 751–769.
83. For a critical account, see Kornely Kakachia, Bidzina Lebanidze, “Georgia’s Dangerous Slide Away from Democracy,” Carnegie Europe, December 10, 2019, https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/80542, accessed September 7, 2021.
84. For some accounts, see Andrew Wilson, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Paul D’Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007); Lucan A. Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), chapter 3.
85. For a critical assessment, see Serhiy Kudelia, “The Maidan and Beyond: The House That Yanukovych Built,” Journal of Democracy 25, no. 3 (2014): 19–34.
86. For some accounts, see Oleksandr Fisun, “The Future of Ukraine’s Neopatrimonial Democracy,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 394 (2015), http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/future-ukraine-neopatrimonial-democracy, accessed September 7, 2021; Beyond Euromaidan: Comparative Perspective of Advancing Reforms in Ukraine, eds. Henry E. Hale, Robert W. Orttung (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).
87. On the impact of oligarchs, see Judy Dempsey, “The Long Road to Dismantling Ukraine’s Oligarchic Democracy,” Carnegie Europe, April 16, 2015, https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/59798, accessed September 7, 2021; Heiko Pleines, “Oligarchs and Politics in Ukraine,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 24, no. 1 (2016): 105–127; Satu Kahkonen, “What Is the Cost of Crony Capitalism for Ukraine?,” The World Bank, March 15, 2018, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/opinion/2018/03/15/what-is-the-cost-of-crony-capitalism-for-ukraine, accessed September 7, 2021.
88. For a detailed account, see Maria Popova, Daniel Beers, “No Revolution of Dignity for Ukraine’s Judges: Judicial Reform after Euromaidan,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 28, no. 1 (2020): 113–142.
89. See Scott Radnitz, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
90. On these issues, see Maria Popova, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies: A Study of Courts in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
91. For a more detailed account of challenges to the quality of governance in the post-Soviet region, see The Struggle for Good Governance in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, eds. Michael Emerson, Denis Genusa, Tamara Kovziridze, Veronica Movchan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).
92. See William R. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Gero Erdmann, Ulf Engel, Neopatrimonialism Revisited: Beyond a Catch-All Concept (Hamburg: German Institute for Global and Area Studies, 2006), GIGA Working Paper no. 16, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/71729549.pdf, accessed September 7, 2021.
93. On the coercive and infrastructural capacity of the state, see Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.
94. See Francis Fukuyama, “The Pandemic and Political Order,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (2020), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-09/pandemic-and-political-order, accessed September 7, 2021.
95. See Anton Troianovski, “You Can’t Trust Anyone’: Russia’s Hidden Covid Toll Is an Open Secret,” The New York Times, April 10, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/world/europe/covid-russia-death.html, accessed September 7, 2021. See also calculations by Alexey Zakharov, Higher School of Economics, https://www.facebook.com/alexei.zakharov.1/posts/3663318147058819, accessed September 7, 2021.
96. See Charlie Giattino, Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Joe Hassel, “Excess Mortality during the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19),” Our World in Data, February 14, 2022, https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid, accessed February 16, 2022.
97. See Grigorii Yudin, “Edinstvennyi ili nikakoi: chego khochet ot plebiscite Putin i chto mogut sdelat’ opponenty,” republic.ru, June 11, 2020, https://republic.ru/posts/96942, accessed September 7, 2021.