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AllDemocracyGorbachevPerestroikaRussiaSoviet UnionTurkmenistanYeltsin

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“Here is a perfectly grotesque example of such compromise. US senator Alan Cranston reportedly said, after a visit to Turkmenistan, sounding like Türkmenbaşy himself, ‘Of course, you don’t build a democratic state in a day. In America, we’ve been at it 200 years, and even here it isn’t perfect. In my opinion, Turkmenistan is slowly but surely walking a path toward a democratic society and economic transition’.”

DemocracyTurkmenistan
Book:Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System
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“Gorbachev’s injunctions to go ‘back to Lenin’, to ‘socialism with a human face’, his yearning to uncover some constitutive humanism in the origins of Communist ideology, elicited no response except insofar as they offered a convenient form of protest, and then only so long as people feared and believed in the durability of Communism, and remained afraid to express themselves openly. In order to implement his plan to democratize the Soviet state while preserving its ideological heritage, Gorbachev needed a certain number of people who understood his calls not as mere rhetoric, but as literal and sincere. These people never appeared.”

Soviet UnionGorbachevPerestroika
Book:Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System
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“However unpopular Yeltsin may have been, traditionalist loyalty was already being forcefully redirected toward the new powers of the presidency. There is a story that so clearly and beautifully illustrates this that I will recount it here, though I cannot, unfortunately, remember where I read it. A journalist was speaking with an old woman who lived in poverty. The woman was going on, tearing Yeltsin apart, while speaking wistfully of the Soviet regime. When the journalist asked her whom she would support in the upcoming presidential election, she answered, ‘Yeltsin’. ‘But what about Zyuganov?’ ‘When Zyuganov’s president, we’ll vote for Zyuganov.’ There were a great many such old women; in fact everyone, including both Yeltsin’s active opponents and the democrat-intellectuals, was to one degree or another an old lady of this kind. The fear of a change in power, of a return to revolutionary chaos, proved stronger than dissatisfaction with the government. Yeltsin’s supporters’ avowals that power would not be handed to the Communists even if they won the election, which in some countries would have stirred mass indignation, worked in the president’s favour in Russia.”

RussiaYeltsin
Book:Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System
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