Resisting the Black Knight: Democratic Self-Defense in the Post-Soviet States.

Democracy is in a parlous position in the post-Soviet states. Only Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia hold out as ‘hybrid regimes’, with the remainder of the post-Soviet space being a bastion of consolidated authoritarian regimes. At the same time, Russia’s role in the consolidation of authoritarianism is contested – some accounts seeing it as a ‘Black Knight’ strategic subverter of democracy, others as a more episodic and non-strategic interventionist. Nevertheless, with East-West tensions in the ascendant following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there are grounds for regarding Russia’s export of authoritarianism as an increasingly multifaceted challenge, focussed on undermining elections, legal processes and media freedoms, exporting corruption, leveraging energy dependency and intensifying societal divisions. But what strategies have state and civil-society actors managed to utilise to successfully contest the Black Knight? This chapter surveys the range of activities used in the region in the aim of democratic self-defense. It shows a multiplicity of strategies in use, across the whole range of militant, procedural and social models of democratic self-defense (Nasstrom, 2021). Using the examples of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, this article argues that militant and procedural efforts have had only sporadic success, whereas the social models (focussing on societal well-being and economic development) offer the only lasting defense against external subversion. Nevertheless, democracy remains in a precarious position and the nature of the external challenge is several degrees more severe than in developed democracies further from Russia’s orbit and direct influence.