Slavic Review 80, no. 3 (Fall 2021) The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies doi: 10.1017/slr.2021.144 ___________________________________ CRITICAL DISCUSSION FORUM: AUTHORITY AND POWER IN RUSSIA Authority and Power in Russia Oleg Kharkhordin Russians will surely remember 2020 for two reasons. First, because of the amount of effort that went into ensuring that citizens vote during the July 1 plebiscite on amendments to the 1993 Constitution, which was not required by existing legislation. Second, because of a totally novel phenomenon: the issuing of QR-codes, which effectively limited Moscow residents’ constitu- tional right to free movement, which was justified by the media as a logical response to the COVID pandemic. But what is the rationale for demanding additional political approval in July, when the newly-proposed constitutional amendments had already been adopted through a legally binding procedure in mid-spring? Why allow the mayor of Moscow unprecedented flexibility in limiting basic constitutional rights when, according to President Putin’s famous phrase from the early 2000s, Russia should be “a dictatorship of law”? I will try to show that there is a single logic to both this excessive zeal of the powers that be and their insufficient formalism. This logic is usually explained by many scholars by the simple term, “authoritarianism.” I would like to suggest, however, that the way power and authority are functioning in Russia should perhaps be better analyzed outside of the usual opposition of democracy vs. authoritarianism. In order to build a genealogy of this relationship between power and authority, I will have to start from a rather specific question about the political structure of classical (non-parliamentary) republics. Next I will consider the concept of auctoritas in ancient Rome, and then I will see what insight that concept offers when used as a vantage point from which to reinterpret some key facts of Russian history. Briefly, philosophers and historians have long been insisting that when power and authority coincide in single hands, this might be a sign of a realistic threat of illegality—or of a swiſt transition to such. In his forthcoming book, Novgorod i Venetsiia, Pavel Lukin has compared the role of public assemblies in these two medieval republics. 1 Venice had an equivalent of the veche (assembly) called arengo, but its role was progressively reduced until it stopped functioning altogether in the early fiſteenth century. During the early period of Venetian history, though, it was a key gathering that was frequently called to elect the Doge—and it did so in a way that was similar to how the veche in Novgorod could grant or deny power to a posadnik, an elected city mayor. This rather unruly order of election was eventually replaced by what we know from the classical rendition of a mature political system in Venice: De 1. Pavel Lukin, Novgorod i Venetsiia: Sravnitel΄no-istoricheskie ocherki stanovleniia respublikanskogo stroia (St. Petersburg, forthcoming, 2021).