ABSTRACT
What a difference a decade makes. In 1991, there was cause for celebration for democrats around the world and in Russia in particular. In August of that year, an effort to overthrow the reformist Gorbachev regime in Russia ended in failure as tens of thousands rallied to defend recently acquired freedoms. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had disintegrated and the Soviet communist system, arguably the greatest global threat to democracy and liberty at least since the end of World War II, was no more. Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the newly independent Russian state, was by now an implacable anticommunist who appeared to be committed to transforming Russia into a democracy and reintegrating Russia with the West. This change in Russia seemed in accord with the provocative argument of Francis Fukuyama that the world had reached “the end of history”—a point at which all the great debates about how best to organize societies politically and economically had been resolved. According to Fukuyama, democracy, in the political realm, and markets, in the economic realm, had triumphed over all challengers and were in the process of becoming the universal forms of political and economic organization. 1 Nothing seemed to confirm this optimistic view more than the transformation under way in Russia.
