Sovereignty is a collection that constitutes the cerebral assault of the Russian elite on post-Soviet processes in order to create a new political language to make sense of the developments of the past 15 years. Those involved in this general attack include President Vladimir Putin (represented by an article made up of material from his speeches), leading politicians Dmitry Medvedev and Vladislav Surkov, as well as political scientists and philosophers such as Vitaly Tretyakov, Andrei Kokoshin, Valery Fadeyev, and Andrei Sokolov, among others.

In terms of the caliber of names and the level of thought, this collection is unprecedented in Russia. The main focus for the writers is the concept of national sovereignty, and they treat it as the main value around which all state thinking should be organized. The anthology covers a number of aspects of sovereignty, including the political, economic, axiological, and historical.

Put simply, sovereignty is a state’s freedom from any dependency in both its internal affairs and foreign policy. In today’s world, when Europe puts the values of the European Union above national priorities and takes little account of Russian concerns; when opposition to membership of a common economic space is sometimes more keenly felt than a desire for direct competition; when the ideals of an open society and globalization undermine issues of national independence and portray sovereignty as the enemy of the common good; a discussion of this topic is vital to Russia’s development.

The opinions of all the books’ authors from the president to the political scientist boil down to one common denominator: democracy in Russia should be sovereign, but the desired sovereignty must be achieved and maintained exclusively by democratic means.

In essence, what we have before us is a proposition for a global application of the ideology of Russian sovereign democracy

Published by Yevropa Publishers, Moscow, 2006, 292 pp.

Russia Profile August 16, 2006