ABSTRACT
Post-Soviet Russia, which officially began its existence as the Russian Federation on January 1, 1992, was considerably downsized from both the pre-1917 Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Russia's problems were as immense and complex as the country itself. One of the most costly legacies of seventy years of Soviet totalitarianism was that once it collapsed it left so little on which to build. By contrast, when non-Communist authoritarian regimes collapsed in European countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, or in Chile in South America, they left behind social and economic institutions that had been permitted to operate independently of the state so long as they did not interfere with the existing political dictatorship. A widespread and legitimate complaint among Russia's hard-pressed masses was that Yeltsin's policy amounted not to genuine privatization, or what had been trumpeted as 'people's privatization', but to institutions.
