ABSTRACT
The surest way to create a democratic Russia was to privatize, cut the role of the State, and unleash free-market economic individualism. The historical approach to post-Soviet Russia draws attention to the massive obstacles in the way of combining shock therapy and democracy. The ideological, political and diplomatic break with the past appeared so profound that free marketeers favoured the analogy between post-war Federal Germany and post-Soviet Russia. Friction over shock therapy was among the issues inflaming relations between the central government and the autonomous units within the Russian Federation. The distant dream could not in itself fill the ideological vacuum or overcome the virtual crisis of identity induced by social dislocation, economic insecurity, the collapse of the USSR, and the precipitate decline in Russian prestige. The refounded Russian Federation Communist Party, whose own programme read at face value very like a variant of the social-democratic mixed economy, carried the odour of its reviled predecessor.
