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.

Is Russia lost? To read the barrage of op-ed articles, congressional testimony, and political position papers that have flowed from both the left and the right since last summer, one might have concluded that Russia is dead and gone - and the Clinton Administration is to blame. It is true that eight years after the fall of communism, Russia is riddled with corruption, its politics are unstable, and the structures of democracy and free markets have yet to strike deep roots. There is also a resurgent anti-Western element in Russian politics. But Russia is not lost.

Historians will someday write that Russia re-entered the Western community of states as a market democracy at the end of the 20th century. You wouldn't think so, however, from the vituperative and pessimistic tone of most contemporary commentary in the United States about Russia and U.S.-Russian relations. Focusing on lurid accounts of Russian money laundering, cronyism, and widespread political and economic disarray, politicians and pundits have blasted the Clinton administration for mishandling a crucial strategic relationship and "losing" Russia.

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.

Five years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a new political and economic system has evolved in Russia. Russia After Communism provides an overall assessment of what has been accomplished and what has failed to date, and where Russia is heading. In a unique collaborative effort, the book features chapters on major issues written by pairs of leading Russian and American scholars.

Michael McFaul and Nikolai Petrov analyze the Russian elections since 1989 and assess voting behavior. Scott Bruckner and Lilia Shevtsova address the question of whether Russia has become a stable pluralist society. Martha Brill Olcott and Valery Tishkov focus on the nature of the Russian nation as well as regional relations. Russia has become a market economy, but what kind of capitalism is being formed? Anders Aslund and Mikhail Dmitriev examine the continuing challenge of economic reform. Sherman Garnett and Dmitri Trenin analyze Russia's relations with its nearest neighbor. Stephen Sestanovich examines Russia's place in the world.

Beginning in 1993, left or communist successor parties have achieved electoral success in several postcommunist countries as critics of neo-liberal reform. They have focused their electoral appeals on the social costs of reform, promising greater public welfare and moderation of economic policies. The present volume examines the impact of these parties on social policy in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Eastern Germany, and the Czech Republic, asking: Do left parties commit greater resources to social policy, or are they constrained by finances, international pressures, or their own conversion to market ideology? Do they seek to promote a social-democratic model of the welfare state, or look to models that assign the state a more limited role? Are they acting opportunistically in appealing to popular grievances or effectively building a consensus around a policy agenda? Answers to these questions are used to address a broader theoretical concern: What does being "left" mean in the postcommunist context?