ABSTRACT
The new Russian electoral law imitated the German system, giving voters two ballots, one for a party list and a second for a constituency candidate. Russia’s experiment with representative institutions and parliamentary democracy began in the spring of 1989. By the spring of 1995 it had survived the collapse of an empire and two military confrontations in the heart of Moscow. For Mikhail Gorbachev, searching already for his niche in history, liberty was a gift he had bestowed on his people, even at the price of the death of the Soviet Union. The struggle for power in the dying days of the Soviet Union was complicated by institutional confusion, created largely by Gorbachev himself. A handful of communists waved red flags in front of Lenin’s tomb. A couple, out for an evening stroll, tried to grasp the idea that they had been born in the Soviet Union but would die in another country.
