ABSTRACT
Looking at the situation in Europe’s former Communist states, the picture is varied. Some societies have managed in the wake of the collapse of the Communist regimes to revitalise their political traditions, peeling off, as it were, the veneer of Communist politics and thereby baring the healthy (or not so healthy) past political arrangements. Russian society, however, has faced a different challenge since 1991 (King 2000). The furrows of the Communist project ran deeper here and the veneer is thicker, rendering it impossible to declare a simple ‘return’ after an ‘accident’ that had lasted more than seventy years. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been a country in search of the
meaning of the suffering that Communism had exacted over the last seven decades. Since neither a simple ‘return’ to pre-revolutionary times nor a consensus on an entirely novel modern Russia seemed to emerge for a long time, Russian historians and political scientists had to do it the hard way: to come to terms with, and try to make sense of, the Soviet experiment, and thereby address the needs of the present.
