ABSTRACT
From being an expansionist imperialist state, Russia, the largest of the newly independent post-Soviet states, has become one of the great test cases of transition to democracy. Transition studies are a rather loose embodiment of political science approaches and ideas about the nature of political and economic development. The impoverishment of Russian society began during perestroika, when Mikhail Gorbachev's mismanagement of economic reforms undermined the basis of the Soviet social contract. Transition studies are a broad church within which we can identify two main schools: the 'functionalist' and the 'genetic'. The context of Soviet-type modernisation, conducted in conditions of global competition with the rival ideology and system of Western capitalist democracy, created unsustainable pressures on the monist authoritarian political regime. Political contingency and the agents of change are the focus of this model of transition, pioneered in a seminal study by Dankwart Rustow.
