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THE TRANSFORMATION OF RUSSIA’S POLITICAL LIFE IN 2003–2007 was profound, and it did not remain unnoticed by international democracy observers. Freedom House downgraded Russia’s status from ‘partly free’in 2003 to ‘not free’in 2007; the Polity IV DEMOC score for Russia decreased from six in 2003 to five in 2007, which corresponds with crossing a major dividing line between an imperfect democracy and outright authoritarianism. 1 From such scores, one might conclude, what we have observed is a period of regime change. Indeed, several scholars and analysts have invested their efforts into the study of a set of incentives and strategies that led Russia’s leadership to an abrupt authoritarian turn (Gill 2006; Hassner 2008; McFaul & Stoner-Weiss 2008). What is often missing in such analyses, however, is the process of transformation. Perhaps because they have concentrated on the national level of …