The five diverse chapters herein are papers presented at the Strategic Studies Institute's (SSI) IV Annual Conference on Russia that took place in Carlisle, PA, on May 15-16, 2012. They represent the first two panels of that conference, which examined politics and economics in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Despite their diversity of assessments and the varied subjects upon which they touch, the conclusions that they present are rather uniform in their pessimism concerning current and future trends in Putin's Russia. Readers will encounter here an immobilized political system that is essentially an archaic, neo-Tsarist, patrimonial, insular, even criminalized system where there is no rule of law, sanctity of contract, or guaranteed right of property, not to mention the civil and human rights we take for granted.