ABSTRACT
A quarter of a century after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, it became clear that some ideas popular in the 1990s about the paths of political, social and economic development for many post-socialist countries were unjustified. Today, the terms “transitional economies” and “transitional countries” sound rather out of place, since they were intended to mean that widespread transition was occurring from Communist systems to market democracies. However, the “end of history” described by Francis Fukuyama (1992) turned out to be yet another political myth. Instead, a fundamental schism took shape. The former socialist countries of Eastern Europe that joined the EU became market democracies,1 whereas a number of countries from the former Soviet Union formed a new authoritarian zone. Initially this zone was located at the periphery, in Central Asia, Azerbaijan and Belarus, but in the first decade of the twenty-first century Russia became a consolidated authoritarian regime and finally turned into a guarantor for all the autocracies in the territory of the former USSR.
