Most protests in Russia in recent years have not demanded the transformation of that country's political regime. Instead, most of those protests have focused on specific policy goals that have reflected disruptions in the daily lives of groups of citizens. In 2017 a heated debate erupted when Sergei Sobianin, the Mayor of Moscow, announced a plan to demolish and replace hundreds of thousands of old apartments in that city. While many residents of those apartments welcomed that plan, many others charged that it threatened to infringe on their right of ownership of private property. The plan was subjected to vigorous criticism both at the grass roots level and the elite level. The national leadership and the government of Moscow became involved in revising the legislation to authorize Sobianin's plan that had been introduced in the national legislature. Before the law was approved, the leaders had made a number of concessions to its critics.
Soviet statements of policy on nationality relations traditionally have expressed a commitment to equalize economic development among the union republics of the USSR. As early as the 1920s, Soviet leaders promised to reduce differences between more advanced and more backward republics. The program adopted in 1961 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the intention of "devoting special attention to those areas of the country which are in need of more rapid development." The goal of economic equalization among union republics is said by Soviet sources to have broad social and political significance, and the elimination of disparities in the economic base is thought to be necessary for the achievement of harmony among Soviet nationalities.
The large-scale protests that took place in Moscow during the winter of 2011-2012 and the demonstrations on a smaller scale in many other cities of Russia at the same time brought civil society in that country into the headlines around the world. Some Western journalists even suggested that those protests signaled the birth of civil society in Russia. Yet in fact, civil society had been present in the Russian Federation throughout the years since the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Though it is impossible to know exactly how many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) exist in Russia today, it is safe to say that thousands of them are active. The evidence that is presented in the articles in this section testifies to the stubborn persistence of organizations in Russian society in the face of conditions that often have been very unfavorable. [Copyright The Regents of the University of California; published by Elsevier Ltd.]
During the 1990s American leaders and many others in the West viewed Russia as the most important test case for a transition to democracy. Today the consensus of scholarly analyses in the West concludes that, if Russia did enter a transition to democracy, that transition was not successful. This article attempts to suggest some of the main lessons about democratization that may be derived from the study of the experience of post-communist Russia, seen in a comparative perspective.The thesis that the first competitive national election after the downfall of an authoritarian regime marks a decisive breakthrough for forces striving for democratization has not proved true for Russia. Yet the withering of democracy and the consolidation of a semi-authoritarian regime followed the period of competitive elections in Russia.In the early and mid-1990s scholars who had specialized in the study of communist regimes warned that the post-communist states would need to carry out radical economic and social changes as well as sweeping political transformation. In Russia, however, the consequences of a corrupted process of privatization of state assets were enormously damaging for the institutionalization of democracy.As was shown in a number of countries in the 1970s and 1980s, a strong civil society can play an important role in a nation's transition to democracy. The barriers to the development of civil society within the Soviet system and the conditions causing weakness in social organizations in post-communist Russia made it easier for members of the elite to subvert reform and guaranteed that there would be fewer restraints on the tendency toward more authoritarian control after 2000.Among post-communist nations, those in which a consensus of most segments of the elite and the public was committed to a radical break with the old system have been much more successful in carrying out marketization and democratization. The combination of historical conditions that had created a strong anti-communist consensus in most of Eastern Europe had not taken shape in Russia. The absence of a fusion of democratization and national liberation in Russia explained the lack of a clear national consensus in favor of political and economic transformation.One of the main lessons from the course of events in Russia from the early 1990s to the present is that change away from one form of authoritarian rule, which usually has been labeled as a transition to democracy, is not irreversible. Some democratic transitions may prove to be shallow, and the changes in post-communist Russia have provided a good example of a shallow transition. The scholarly literature on transitions to democracy that appeared after the early 1980s departed from earlier writings' emphasis on the growth of social, economic, and cultural conditions for the institutionalization of democracy in the political system. The experience of Russia may encourage us to return to the study of the long-term trends facilitating or inhibiting the growth of democratic institutions.
