Putin's military forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, sparking a renewed academic interest in Russia's current regime. Several scholars suggested that a critical period in the construction of the current regime occurred between 1999-2013 during Putin's first two presidencies followed by the Medvedev presidency. This is when the basic institutions of the current Russian political system were changed to recentralize state authority and prevent Russian Federation from looming disintegration. One such institution was the budgetary process. Signed into law in 1998, Russian Budget Code established how funds were disbursed from the "center" to the federal "subjects" and other entities. Many scholars have pointed out that one specific mechanism, namely "Intergovernmental Transfers", can be used to achieve the political goals of a regime by rewarding supporters, swinging the competitive electoral districts, or appeasing the opposition or separatist regions. The goal of this dissertation to investigate under what conditions a non-democratic regime, like Russia, uses these strategies for political effect? Do those strategies change over time? In this work, I develop a basic theoretical framework outlining such conditions and test it using the municipal-level data gathered from the Russian Federal State Statistics Service and Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.

This study presents a linguistic profile of a heritage speaker of Russian and recounts the efforts to revitalize his Russian after he had nearly stopped speaking it. The study was conducted over the course of almost two years, starting when the subject was twelve years old and ending when he was fourteen. Although this study found that the subject displayed many of the linguistic features typical of heritage speakers, the subject's Russian had suffered less attrition than is common for heritage speakers of Russian in the United States. This study presents its linguistic findings under the rubrics of phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics/pragmatics. This study also describes the pedagogical efforts to improve the subject's reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills in Russian. Finally, this study includes some reflections on the psychological factors that influenced the methodology and outcome.

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My thesis is about one of the most distinctive cities in the Russian Federation - Kazan. In my thesis I focus on the changes that were unfolding in the landscape and structure of Kazan in the post-Soviet period (1991-2000s). The collapse of the Soviet Union produced an immense paradigm shift as combined revival of nationalism and religion swept over Tatar people who in turn have been actively changing the city. In this work I researched how the Tatar religious and national revival affected the landscape and structure of Kazan. I used data such as landmarks, memorials, establishments, institutions and other symbolic, religious or national elements of the city in order to demonstrate the scope of the Tatar urban revival. Additionally, I tried to understand the actual causes and processes that contributed to the revival. Tatar revitalization of Kazan is a complex social phenomenon which reveals many important political and global processes. / Urban Studies