ABSTRACT
The wider public debate in Russia on the objectives and aims of the social and political reforms may not have taken much notice of the intricacies and technicalities that characterise the academic debate. Yet, given the effects of the early reforms under the Yeltsin administration, there have been some well-informed and sophisticated voices of dissent among the Russian academic community. Following the broad criticism of the liberal reforms under the team of Yegor Gaidar, some Russian scholars have embarked on the well-trodden path of politically or ideologically motivated criticism, but some others have, more constructively, attempted to analyse the set of assumptions that have informed the early reform projects in order to extrapolate from this some general insights into the dynamics of the transformation process. This intention has, at times inadvertently, thrust them into the midst of a very lively and acute debate that has raged in the West on post-totalitarian transformations and how to model transitions from authoritarian to democratic forms of governance (Schmitter and Karl 1994; Kopecky and Mudde 2000; McFaul 2002; Munck 2001; Przeworski et al. 1996).
