In this book, distinguished U.S. and Russian scholars analyze the great challenges confronting post-Communist Russia and examine the Yeltsin government's attempts to deal with them. Focusing on problems of state- and nation-building, economic reform, demilitarization, and the definition of Russia's national interests in its relations with the outside world, the authors trace the complex interplay between the Communist legacy and efforts to chart new directions in both domestic and foreign policy. They give special attention to the defeat of liberal reformers in the latest parliamentary elections and to the implications of that shift for Russia's domestic and foreign policy in the years ahead.

Western analysts have become increasingly alarmed with Russia's assertive foreign policy -- in both the economic and the political/strategic spheres -- toward the new states of the former Soviet Union. Many have cited Russia's military interventions in Georgia, Tajikistan, and Moldova as signals of Russia's new imperialist designs. Russian policy toward the Baltic states has also spurred alarm. While Russian troops pulled out of the Baltic states as planned, the Russian Foreign Ministry has nonetheless threatened economic sanctions against Estonia and Latvia if citizenship rights for Russians are not further delineated in these states. Beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union, Russian assertiveness regarding sanctions against Serbia, NATO expansion, and arms trade with developing countries has compelled several analysts to speak of a renewal of Russian expansionist tendencies and hence a return of Cold War tension between West and East.

Despite the alarmist cries in the West over the outcome of Russia's election on Sunday, the overall balance in Parliament between the Communists and nationalists, on one hand, and the broad reformist middle, on the other, will not change.

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The increasing prospect of a communist and nationalist victory in Russia's parliamentary elections this month has fueled doubts about whether Russia's presidential election, scheduled for next June, will take place.

Even before President Boris Yeltsin's latest heart attack, the odds were only 50-50 for a democratic transfer of power, which has never occurred in Russia or the Soviet Union. There is a determination to preserve the status quo on the part of those who have prospered under Yeltsin's reign - whether Russia's new banking tycoons, gas and oil executives or the entourage of Kremlin aides that surrounds Yelstin. Re-electing Yeltsin, of course, has been their preferred strategy.

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Initially printed as "Signal Our Support for Democracy," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1995.

Michael McFaul comments that the process leading up to the parliamentary vote on Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's government in Jul 1995 suggests that the future of Russia's fragile democracy may not be so bleak.

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After Chechnya, many analysts predicted that Russia's flirtation with democracy was over. However, the process leading up to the parliamentary vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's government last week suggests that the future of Russia's fragile democracy may not be so bleak. In fact, the so-called governmental crisis of the last two weeks has demonstrated that respect for the democratic process by Russian politicians is greater now than perhaps at any time in Russian history.

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On December 10, 1994, Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian armed forces into the Republic of Chechnya. For eight weeks thereafter, the Russian military waged a poorly organized but brutally destructive assault on the Chechen capital of Grozny.

Five years after the dramatic fall of communism in Eastern Europe, there is an opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of different forms of liberalization.

The most obvious and controversial difference between reform strategies is in the pace of transition. Previous theories of development have focused on the slow growth of Third World countries into modern economies. Some experts have ascribed current failures in Eastern Europe to the instantaneous liberalization of economies and the forceful application of tight monetary policies.

But this theory is contradicted by the fact that the most successful Eastern European countries, Poland and the Czech Republic, are those that initiated the most dramatic and rapid reforms. The authors of Economic Transition show how educate, relatively modern societies can make major changes in political and economic institutions almost overnight.

Economic Transition in Eastern Europe and Russia is a work of substantial academic merit that is also accessible to the interested layperson. Thirteen essays by acknowledged economic experts explore the rapid changes in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, with discussions on political and economic freedom, monetary control and privatization, labor markets and social safety nets, and taxation and crime.

The neoliberal economic and political models used by Western analysts to explain Russia's recent transformation ignore the interrelationship between the economy and politics. Russia is in the midst of a social revolution. Economic reform without political reform-as attempted by Yegor Gaidar-will fail. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's policies have met with some success because of accompanying political changes. This interrelated pattern of reform must continue.

In January 1992 Russia's first postcommunist government launched a comprehensive economic program to transform the Soviet command system into a market economy. Privatization was and remains the heart of this plan. The original program had a clearly defined objective, namely, to create profit-seeking corporations, privately owned by outside shareholders and not dependent on government subsidies for their survival. As of two years later, however, this objective had not been achieved. By the summer of 1993 insiders had acquired majority shares in two-thirds of Russia's privatized and privatizing firms, state subsidies accounted for 22% of Russia's GNP, little if any restructuring (bankruptcies, downsizing, unbundling) had taken place within enterprises, and few market institutions had been created. During the first two years of its existence, the Russian state simply did not manage to dismantle old Soviet institutional arrangements governing property rights of large enterprises. Specifically, the state failed to implement its original vision of privatization, enforce hard budget constraints for large enterprises, or stimulate the creation of market-supporting institutions such as a legal code regarding private property and corporate governance or a social safety net. In sum, the allocation of property rights according to market principles had not yet even begun to occur.