Stoner, who is also a professor, by courtesy, of Political Science, has served as the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL since 2021. She is the author or co-editor of six books, including her most recent, Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford, 2021), which received the third annual book prize of the Fletcher U.S.-Russia Relations Initiative. She teaches in the Department of Political Science, the Program on International Relations, and the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

“Kathryn brings to FSI a rare combination of rigorous scholarship on Russian politics, exemplary leadership at CDDRL, and a deep commitment to mentoring the next generation of scholars and practitioners,” said Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “I congratulate her on her appointment as the Satre Family Senior Fellow and look forward to the continued impact of her work in the years ahead.”

Below, Stoner discusses her academic career path, her areas of research interest, and what projects lie ahead for her as the newly named Satre Family Senior Fellow.

You’ve written that you were “supposed to be a lawyer,” but the rise of Gorbachev and the opening of the Soviet Union changed your path. What was it about that moment that pulled you toward studying Russia?

Right, my parents had assumed that since I was good at arguing, I liked school, and I was really interested in politics. But something went terribly wrong (or right, depending on your perspective), and my professional life took another path into Political Science and specifically the study of the Soviet Union and then Russia. I had a great set of professors at the University of Toronto, where I was an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, and they really inspired me to study the very strange Soviet political and economic system. The prospect of going to law school got ever more distant, watching the sweeping changes that started in the Soviet system starting in 1985 and Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reforms. He threw the doors open to Soviet society, politics, and history in the ensuing years under “glasnost” or openness. Suddenly, the Soviets seemed human, maybe even friendly, and to me, as a Canadian, their weather, sports, and outdoors were familiar too. I have found the countries of the former Soviet Union, and especially Russia, endlessly fascinating ever since.

Your early work focused on regional and local governments in Russia. Why is the local level such a powerful lens for understanding how political systems work in general?

Well, as the saying goes, all politics are local. I wrote specifically about Russian local governments in the early 1990s because it was a good way to assess whether public goods and services were being provided when the federal government in Russia was almost bankrupt and hardly functioning. It was also a nice natural experiment for a social scientist. There had been a reform that enabled the free and fair election of regional legislatures and governors in almost all of the then 88 provinces of Russia. But some of those newly elected leaders turned out to be able to govern better than others — that is, accomplish basic things like keep schools functioning, pick up the trash, pay public service workers, and the like. I wanted to understand why these new representative governments operated differently under similarly challenging circumstances. It was a really fun project since it meant that I had to travel to different provinces to evaluate the degree to which they could govern and then collect more data on each to understand why there was variation across the cases I studied. This included surveying representative samples of inhabitants in each place, looking to see if there was some sort of difference between the "quality" of citizens (i.e., more or less trusting of one another, or more active in terms of demanding services that were due to them). It turned out that there wasn't much variation on that, but there was variation in the degree to which elites in business and government cooperated to keep services running. That was good news in the short term, but in the long term, there was the threat that this kind of behavior would shut out political competition in the future. Of course, that happened eventually, unfortunately across Russia when Vladimir Putin consolidated control a decade or so later. That study became my first book, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance. One of the provinces where I spent a lot of time was Nizhnii Novgorod, whose governor was very open to my studying how things worked there. This was Boris Nemtsov, whose daughter, Zhanna, was one of our Fisher Family Summer Fellows in 2017, and who is now a partner with CDDRL's Stanford U.S.-Russia Forum (SURF).

More recently, you’ve turned to the study of individually-targeted sanctions, including cases involving Americans. What drew you to this topic, and what does it reveal about how authoritarian regimes operate transnationally?

I started looking into the targeted individual-level sanctions regime on both the U.S. and Russian sides shortly after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. I was personally sanctioned by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 2022, as have been about 15 other people at Stanford as of now. It means that we are permanently barred from getting a visa to Russia or owning property of any sort there. I didn't actually know why the Russian government put me on the list, and I was really disappointed since I had been visiting several times a year for decades when they sanctioned me. So, naturally, I wanted to understand who was being swept up in these targeted sanctions by both sides and why. I began gathering data on both the Russian and American lists to see what the patterns were. From 2014 through the end of 2024, the United States imposed personal sanctions on about 1,700 individual Russian citizens, while the Russians imposed sanctions on 2,078 American citizens — businesspeople, entertainers (Steven Colbert is on the Russian list, for example), politicians, and about 120 or so American academics. It's mostly a tit-for-tat pattern over time, but it also seems that Putin's autocratic regime is far more sensitive about negative things said or written about policies than the United States is about adding someone to its sanctions list. In contrast, the U.S. has targeted individual Russians more directly responsible for or benefiting from the actual conflict in Ukraine and barred them from entry to the U.S. and seized or frozen any assets. The Russian list doesn't actually provide any legal basis for sanctioning an individual, whereas the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFACS) within the Treasury Department cites the specific legislation under which the person is sanctioned. There's a pretty clear consequence for rich Russians who have U.S. assets, too, whereas the consequences for most Americans on the Russian list are minor if they have no personal or professional reason to visit Russia. In my own case, not being able to ever visit Russia again is a pretty severe consequence. It's more than just symbolic, as it is for most others on the Russian list.

For many, Russia’s war in Ukraine looks like a sign of decline. Yet your recent work suggests a far more complicated picture. What are we missing when we frame this conflict in overly simple terms?

I think people underestimated the different tools Russia has to exercise influence globally, and especially in Ukraine. Without a doubt, the U.S. has the most capable military in history, but we shouldn't forget that we couldn't take over Iraq and Afghanistan quite so easily either. That Russia has struggled in Ukraine shouldn't be that surprising, given the size of the country they are trying to take over, the fact that the Ukrainians are literally fighting hard for their very survival, and the Russian military is a big, corrupt bureaucracy. Still, the Russians have learned how to make drones and use them effectively on the battlefield, and at the moment have the upper hand. As a hardened autocracy, Russia is willing to throw soldiers at the problem and take casualties and fatalities at a rate most other countries, including Ukraine, just wouldn't tolerate. Unfortunately, it looks like Russia may well get to keep the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies. Perhaps not, but increasingly that looks like a distinct possibility.

My book, Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order, published just before Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, looked at the different instruments of Russian influence beyond just military power that it uses in various parts of the world. I think it shows that a country doesn't need to have the most military or economic capability in the world to be incredibly disruptive in international relations.

As the newly named Satre Family Senior Fellow, what questions or projects are you most eager to pursue next?

Ah, great question. I have a number of projects that I'm working on now, beyond the sanctions paper, including a large book project that is an attempt to explain the trajectory of Russian development over the last 40 years. It is a transitional "bell" shaped curve — that is, things started from a very low point of political freedom, then gradually became freer, and then reverted to an even harsher form of autocracy under Putin by 2022. It isn't what we all expected in 1985 when I started studying the Soviet Union, unfortunately, and I think there is a need to better understand how this happened, whether the explanation is purely domestic or some interaction between domestic politics and international relations. Hopefully, if there is another political opening in Russia, the book will be able to provide some guidance on what we in the West could do differently to support a transition to a more open political system.