ABSTRACT
As the last hours of December 31, 1999, ticked away, many Russian citizens, disillusioned with their lives in post-Soviet society, expressed little interest in the twentieth century's demise and cherished scant hope for the new millennium ahead. Founder of the "new" Russia, Boris Yeltsin presided over an erratic, messy, incomplete transition from the failing Soviet system to an entirely different society struggling to implement democratic and free-market reforms. Evaluations of his presidency among both Russian and Western observers diverged sharply. The new Russian leadership sought radically to transform the four most basic aspects of the entrenched Soviet system. In 1992, Russian production, hobbled by deficiencies passed along from the larger Soviet system and floundering under the new ground rules, declined by an estimated 20 to 25 percent. By some estimates, the poverty rate in Russia reached 40 percent. In the 1990s, both investors and ordinary citizens deplored the spreading influence of organized gangs, dubbed "the Russian mafia".
