Slavic Review 77, no. 4 (Winter 2018) © 2019 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.292 Pluralism without Democracy, Vertical without Power: From Gor΄kii to Nizhnii Novgorod . . . and Back? Andrey Makarychev In this article I seek to identify the pivotal elements in the political trajec- tory of the Nizhnii Novgorod region since the beginning of the 1990s until present; from the frst democratic experiences and innovations to their dis- avowal and repudiation. I intend to trace the main cycles of region’s political developments and on this basis defne the specifcity of its political system and relations with the federal center. By doing so, I retrospectively look at the evolution of the political landscape in the region during a quarter of century, from the frst post-Soviet years to mature Putinism, and then discuss how political controversies take cultural form and are refected in regional identity debates. The story of Nizhnii Novgorod is an important contribution to the ongo- ing debate on democracy failures in post-Soviet Russia. As a starting point of my analysis, I share the characterization of Russia’s post-Soviet transi- tion as incomplete at best and “hollow” at worst. 1 This general assessment extends to my core argument of a double fasco: both the democratization project launched in the immediate afermath of the Soviet Union’s fall and what is conventionally known as Vladimir Putin’s proverbial “power verti- cal” ultimately failed on most substantial accounts. As the story of Nizhnii Novgorod tells us, the frst post-Soviet decade, with its strong rejection of the Soviet experience, did not produce solid democratic institutions because of the plurality of local political actors. Ironically, Putin’s declared intention of re-subjugating the regions to the sway of the federal center ultimately only cemented pluralist, clan-like types of political regimes at the regional level. Of course, when it comes to center-periphery relations in Russia, there are structural factors common to many Russian regions. These factors include systemic conficts over resource allocation between regional and municipal authorities detrimental to the governability of the region; fragmentation of local political elites based on clan-like networks than on belonging to institu- tions such as political parties; and the submission of the regions to Putin’s recentralization policies. As I will show in this article, the case of Nizhnii Novgorod seems to nicely illustrate all these commonalities. Yet at the same time, despite ofen being described as a typical Russian region, Nizhnii Novgorod’s post-1991 political trajectory exhibits a number of unique features. Thus, Nizhnii Novgorod was not only one of few regions that in the frst years afer the dissolution of the Soviet Union was ruled by democratically-minded governors (perhaps the closest match to Boris Nemtsov as the head of Nizhnii 1. Alfred Evans, “The Failure of Democratization in Russia: A Comparative Perspec- tive,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 2, no. 1, (January 2011): 49. This work was supported by Institutional Research Funding (IUT20–39) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.