Winter 2024

If you listen closely, you can hear a hollow ring to all the triumphalist talk about America’s superpower monopoly since the end of the cold war. True, it is a position without precedent for any government since the days of …

Not since Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982 has Russia had such a prospect of political stability. Vladimir Putin’s election to the presidency this past spring consummated the first voluntary transfer of power—instead of by death or a coup—in the entire …

The collapse of the Soviet Communist regime in 1991 is widely explained as the failure of a utopian experiment. In reality communism ceased to be much of an experiment within months after the October Revolution. The true failed utopian experiment …

There is a certain romantic attraction in the history of lost causes. The losers are usually nicer guys; in the case of the Russian Mensheviks, they were the humanitarian shadow of communist inhumanity. But the Mensheviks’ fate was not a …

The profession that used to be known as sovietology has been torn apart by debates over who failed to predict the collapse of communism, and why. But a greater failure of prediction, by any lights, was Russia’s slide into chaos, …

Logically one should have expected that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites would liberate ideas of democratic control of our economic destiny from the onus of association with the militarized despotism that the Soviets called …

Sovietologists who always thought that deep Russian cultural traits were a major factor shaping Soviet communism found Gorbachev’s perestroika and the rapid progress toward constitutional government under his leadership a perplexing innovation, though a welcome one. Now we know, unfortunately, …

Communist Russia, though oppressive and secretive, was an open book compared to the murky contradictions and competing ideological illusions that mark the new Russia. The country is far more open than it was, but it makes less sense. Furthermore, Westerners’ …