In the wake of Yeltsin's unexpected resignation on 31 December 1999 and the apparent inevitability of Putin's electoral victory in the March 2000 presidential election, the 1999 December parliamentary elections already seem like ancient history. For the analyst of Russian politics, however, Russia's Duma vote offers a new wealth of data that will help reveal important trends in electoral behavior, party development, and institutional consolidation. In this article, written just days after the vote, I cannot pretend to offer definitive conclusions about the election's consequences for any of these important issues. My aim is rather to suggest some tentative hypotheses that may help to guide future discussion and research.

In the recent explosion of articles about "Who Lost Russia," analysts have focused almost exclusively on the trials and tribulations of Russia's economic reform and Western attempts to assist these reforms. Russia's financial collapse in August 1998 and recent accusations of money laundering through the Bank of New York are cited as evidence that Russia is lost. The logic of this analysis is flawed. It assumes that these setbacks to economic reform or the rule of law represent end points in Russian history. In fact, they may really just reflect the transitional consequences of Russia's ongoing revolution. Russia is midstream in one of the most far-reaching attempts in history to simultaneously transform an empire, a polity, and an economy. It is naive to expect this revolution to go smoothly all the way.

The acceptance of human rights and minority rights, the increasing role of international financial institutions, and globalization have led many observers to question the continued viability of the sovereign state. Here a leading expert challenges this conclusion. Stephen Krasner contends that states have never been as sovereign as some have supposed. Throughout history, rulers have been motivated by a desire to stay in power, not by some abstract adherence to international principles. Organized hypocrisy--the presence of longstanding norms that are frequently violated--has been an enduring attribute of international relations

Political leaders have usually but not always honored international legal sovereignty, the principle that international recognition should be accorded only to juridically independent sovereign states, while treating Westphalian sovereignty, the principle that states have the right to exclude external authority from their own territory, in a much more provisional way. In some instances violations of the principles of sovereignty have been coercive, as in the imposition of minority rights on newly created states after the First World War or the successor states of Yugoslavia after 1990; at other times cooperative, as in the European Human Rights regime or conditionality agreements with the International Monetary Fund.

The author looks at various issues areas to make his argument: minority rights, human rights, sovereign lending, and state creation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Differences in national power and interests, he concludes, not international norms, continue to be the most powerful explanation for the behavior of states.

Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister of Russia and one of the principal architects of its historic transformation to a market economy, here presents his lively account of governing in the tumultuous early 1990s. Though still in his forties, Gaidar has already played a pivotal role in contemporary Russian political history, championing the cause of dramatic economic reform, aggressive privatization of state enterprises, and painful fiscal discipline in the face of widespread popular resistance.

"For the first time in several years, politicians across the spectrum-liberals, communists, and nationalists alike-have begun to speak about the specter of Russian fascism should the current economic and political crises continue. Others, including even President Yeltsin, have warned of coup plots aimed at toppling Russia's fragile democracy. What went wrong, so quickly?"

Throughout the history of the modern world, domestic regime change- be it democratization, autocratization, decolonization, decommunization, federal dissolution, coups, or revolutions- has often triggered international conflict and war. When a regime changes, decaying institutions from the ancien regime compete with new rules of the game to shape political competition in ambiguous ways. This uncertain text provides opportunities for political actors, both old and new, to pursue new strategies for achieving their objectives, including belligerent policies against both domestic and international foes. In desperation, losers from regime change may resort to violence to maintain their former privileges. Such internal conflicts become international wars when these interest groups who benefited from the old order call upon their allies to intervene on their behalf or strike out against their enemies as means to shore up their domestic legitimacy. In the name of democracy, independence, the revolution, or the nation, the beneficiaries of regime change also can resort to violence against both domestic and international opponents to secure their new gains.

The historic events of the 1996 presidential election appear to point to true progress in making a Russian democracy. Especially when compared with other periods of Russia's history--be it the confrontational and ultimately bloody politics of the first years of the new Russian state, the seventy years of totalitarian rule under the Communists, or the hundreds of years of autocratic government under the tsars--the following milestones are truly spectacular.

Superpresidentialism, ambiguous federalism, the weakness of political parties and labor and civic organizations, the inordinate strength of big business, and the virtual absence of the rule of law represent major blemishes on Russia's nascent democracy. . . [But] in bemoaning Russia's slow start in consolidating a liberal democracy, we must not forget the important progress made in establishing an electoral democracy in Russia.

Reading the collected works of Alexander Dallin bears little distinction from reviewing the entire history of the Soviet Union. Few authors have written so widely and crossed so many disciplinary boundaries. Categories such as "historian" versus "political scientist" or expert on "domestic" versus "foreign" policy offer little analytic power in describing Alexander Dallin and his work. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, however, the perspective from which we approach this body of work has suddenly changed. Writing on the eve of the disintegration of the USSR, Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus wrote in their introduction to The Soviet System in Crisis that "The changes in Soviet politics and foreign policy precipitated by Gorbachev's leadership challenged the prevailing academic paradigms and the conventional wisdom regarding the Soviet system."

On 17 December 1995, Russian voters elected representatives to the Duma, the lower house of parliament. For the first time in the thousand-year history of Russia, these elections were held under law, as scheduled, and without serious fraud or falsification. Though the balloting occurred in the dead of winter, was only for one house of the parliament, did not include a presidential election, and was confused by the participation of 43 parties, nonetheless an amazing 65 percent of eligible voters turned out. In historical perspective, the conduct of this election must be seen as a positive step toward democratic consolidation in Russia. But while the process was encouraging for democracy, the results were not. Parties with questionable democratic and reformist credentials made significant gains in the Duma.