The Democratic Development of the former Soviet Union
Bill Wallace looks at the mixed inheritance of democratic ideas in Mother Russia and beyond as possible auguries for the future of the regimes that have succeeded the Soviet Union.
When Western observers assess the likely democratic prospects of what was the Soviet Union, they tend to maintain that its peoples lack a representative tradition on which to build, and to cite the uncertainty, inefficiency, disorderliness and crises that have marked events of the last decade as signs of a bleak outlook. But this is to forget the troubled history of democracy in the West and to misinterpret developments in the East, particularly Russia.
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