The political history of Eurasia since 1991 can be understood as a process in which the patronal networks described in the previous chapter, like building blocks, were formed, reformed, split, combined, arranged, and rearranged (or, in some cases, destroyed). To understand the patterns that eventually emerged in this process, it is crucial to keep in mind that they did not appear instantly or automatically. Instead, the Soviet collapse produced a situation of extreme institutional flux with all the economic and social turmoil one might expect to accompany it. Not only was it often unclear where the new loci of power would be, but it was not even clear what constituted power itself – either in the moment at hand or for the future. Old institutions that had once seemed permanent disappeared at the same time that new ones – both formal and informal – could appear and disappear like flashes in the pan. This applied to networks as well, so one makes a grave mistake assuming that any networks in the post-Soviet period were simply holdovers from the Soviet period. But even once networks were newly formed or revived with new meaning as described in the previous chapter, politicians’ expectations regarding their relative power remained highly uncertain in the initial post-Soviet period. Indeed, this was not something anyone there had experienced before. The post-Soviet political context was completely new, leaving both old and new networks and network entrepreneurs essentially to duke it out and gradually establish a stable set of expectations over time through a process of trial and error.

In this context of great initial uncertainty, presidentialist constitutions – through the focal and information effects described in Chapter 4 – worked in mutually reinforcing conjunction with prior power balances to produce Eurasia’s first post-Soviet single-pyramid systems almost everywhere by the end of the 1990s. Typically, as described in Chapter 5, the initial presidencies were created and occupied by the chairmen of Soviet republic parliaments, who by virtue of having won the USSR’s first competitive republic-level elections in 1990 tended to be either the most powerful patrons or “compromise” figures chosen to solidify power-sharing deals among coalitions.