"During the Yeltsin years, it became fashionable in the West to cite Russia's weak state as the source of Russia's ills. Putin has demonstrated after only a few months in office that the Russian federal state still has tremendous power-perhaps too much power-if the man in control of that state is vigorous, ambitious, and popular."

Russian democracy and American national security are intimately intertwined. This link is not new, but it is not well understood. When the cold war ended and Soviet communism disappeared, American national security was enhanced. If dictatorship returns to Russia, the United States and its allies will once again be threatened. Containment would likely be adopted as the guiding principle of American foreign policy. The United States could find itself in an arms race with Russia. We argue here that the connection of Russian politics and U.S. security needs to be clearer in the minds of U.S. decision makers. Failure to recognize and respond to this link will have consequences for U.S. security interests.

Russia's March 2000 presidential election represents one step forward and two steps back for Russian democracy. For the first time in Russia's history, power within the Kremlin has changed hands through an electoral process. The election not only took place but was conducted as constitutionally prescribed, no small achievement for a country with Russia's authoritarian history. More than two-thirds of the eligible voters participated, and they appeared to make informed choices among a range of candidates who offered competing platforms, policies, and leadership styles. The election, however, was not contested on a level playing field. The winner, acting president Vladimir Putin, enjoyed tremendous advantages that tainted the process. Although weak in some arenas, the Russian state still enjoys too much power with respect to the electoral process, while nongovernmental forces--political parties, civic organizations, trade unions, and independent business groups--remain too weak to shape the outcomes of elections.

Two specialists on Russian politics chronicle the formation and early development of Unity, the latest version of the "party of power" in Russian politics. Unity's unexpected success in the election of the State Duma in December 1999 helped assure Vladimir Putin's subsequent election as president and gave him a reliable base of support within the Duma itself. The authors draw on extensive interviews with participants to outline the motivations behind the creation of Unity and the campaign strategy it pursued in the fall of 1999. They go on to analyze popular sources of support for the party, relying on a two-wave panel survey of the Russian electorate.

A party system is an essential attribute of a democratic policy. No parties, no democracy. Despite the erosion of the influence of parties in old democracies and the difficulties of establishing new parties in new democracies, theorists still agree that parties and a party system are necessary evils for the functioning of representative government. In liberal democracies, parties perform several tasks. During elections, they provide voters with distinctive choices, be they ideological, social, or even ethnic. After elections, parties then represent the interests of their constituents in the formulation (and sometimes implementation) of state policy. The degree of party penetration of state institutions need not correlate directly with a given party?s power over policy outcomes. Empowered by expertise or connections to key decision makers, small parties can have inordinate influence over policy debates, while large parties may suffer the opposite: no expertise, no personal networks, and therefore, little influence over policy. Yet, some degree of representation within the state is usually necessary for a party to influence policy outcomes. In polities with highly developed party systems, parties also perform other functions that can include everything from organizing social life to social welfare.

Days after staring down the August 1991 coup attempt, Russian President Boris Yeltsin boasted a 90 percent approval rating at home, adorned the cover of every international weekly in the world, and was christened a democratic hero by world leaders from Washington to Tokyo. When he suddenly resigned as president on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin enjoyed an eight percent approval rating at home (with a margin of error of plus or minus four percent). He probably had only two or three international calls to make. With the exception of Bill Clinton and a few others, Yeltsin had almost no friends in high places left. Even the Western media all but ignored the passing of this onetime hero. When Clinton appeared that morning to comment on Yeltsin's retirement, most American television networks chose instead to air the fireworks display in Beijing.

Russia today is an electoral democracy. Political leaders come to power through the ballot box. They are not appointed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They do not take office by seizing power through the use of force. Most elites in Russia and the vast majority of the Russian population now recognize elections as the only legitimate means to power. Leaders and parties that espouse authoritarian practices--be they fascists or neocommunists--have moved to the margins of Russia's political stage. Given Russia's thousand-year history of autocratic rule, the emergence of electoral democracy must be recognized as a revolutionary achievement of the last decade.

At the Gleneagles summit in July 2005, the heads of state from the G-8 countries - the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom - called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the African Development Bank to cancel 100 percent of their debt claims on the world's poorest countries. The world's richest countries have agreed in principle to forgive roughly $55 billion dollars owed by the world's poorest nations. This article considers the wisdom of the proposal for debt forgiveness, from the standpoint of stimulating economic growth in highly indebted countries. In the 1980s, debt relief under the "Brady Plan" helped to restore investment and growth in a number of middle-income developing countries. However, the debt relief plan for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) launched by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1996 has had little impact on either investment or growth in the recipient countries. We will explore the key differences between the countries targeted by these two debt relief schemes and argue that the Gleneagles proposal for debt relief is, at best, likely to have little effect at all. Debt relief is unlikely to help the world's poorest countries because, unlike the middle-income Brady countries, their main economic difficulty is not debt overhang, but an absence of functional economic institutions that provide the foundation for profitable investment and growth. We will show that debt relief may be more valuable for Brady-like middle-income countries than for low-income ones because of how it leverages the private sector.

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.