Assessing Impact of Advisory Agencies on the Policy towards Civil Society in Contemporary Russia

Civil society, in its classical form, is a relatively new phenomenon for Russia. In the period of two and a half decades of democracy existing in the country, Russian civil society developed into a strong field of interaction, which involves a big number of different institutions, representing political, social and economic interests of groups of population. The paper is mainly focused on a contemporary period (2000, 2010-s) of Russian history, tracing the path of civil society institution’s development and highlighting the moments of massive shifts in Russian public policy towards them. The core part of this paper is based on the content and network analysis of data collected from primary sources: statistical and public reports, concerned the activity of NGO’s, news, and public speeches of the main government and non-government representatives. Mainly, the work will consist of three parts. The theoretical part will define the main tendencies in the interaction between state actors and civil society and, basing on the previous studies in this sphere, will point out the main properties, which specify exact Russian public policy in this aspect. The second part will present a map of network interactions, built in UCInet, which would reflect the intensity of communications between actors and highlight most significant partisans of such interactions. Based on the observations, and also considering the fact of a huge decline in the performance of civil society in Russia after 2015, there can be made a conclusion, that absence of analytical and advisory plurality alongside with bureaucratic growth, while it can lead to positive results in other domestic branches of policy, in the case of civil society cause a big drawback in the development. Based on this observation, as well as taking into account bursts of civic activism in the late 2010s, which occurred outside the legal field and are of an informal nature, it can be stated that the reduction in communications between state actors and non-governmental advisors (including NGOs that are key civil society) in the branch of public policy towards civil society inevitably lead to the downfall of performance and efficiency of the policy.