Russia's Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin by Graeme s> Gill Roger D. Markwick (review)

Abstract

372 SEER, 79, 2, 200I Tatarstan'sexceptional autonomy in the Russian Federation.Another weakness of the study is that Kondrashov leaves almost unmentioned the Russian federal centre's policies towards Tatar nationalism, which have played a crucial role in propping up the Tatar political establishment against Tatar nationalists. Finally, a word on Kondrashov's sources. He seems to have relied disproportionallyon Russianlanguage sources.As a result,his analysisof the debate on Tatar nationalism is limited to those Tatar scholars writing in Russian. The exclusion of sources in Tatar is an important weakness for a study on Tatar nationalism. Moreover, Kondrashov'ssources are not up-todate . Noteworthy sources in Russian published after I995, such as Damir M. Iskhakov'swork Problemy stanovleniia i transformatsii tatarskoi natsii(Kazan', I997), are absentin his listof bibliography. Despite these weaknesses, I would strongly recommend this book to all researchersspecializingon Russia'sethnic republics. Schoolof SlavonicandEast EuropeanStudies OKTAY F. TANRISEVER University ofLondon Gill, Graeme and Markwick, Roger D. Russia'sStillbornDemocracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. X + 280 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [4o.oo; [i6.99. A shift has taken place in the debate over the emergence of Gorbachev and his successors.If at firstwe focused on what could be called 'Sovietological' issues,the degree to which the changes repudiatedthe Communistlegacy and fitted in with detailed patterns of national history, then today the focus has shifted firmly to broader issues of comparative politics, and in particularto problems of democratization.This book, curiously,seeksto do both, and this reviewer is not fully convinced (despite its many qualities) that it has satisfactorilyachieved either. On the one hand, it providesa detailed blow by blow account of the Gorbachev and El'tsinyears in power, with every main turn in the political strugglepresented in considerable detail. On the other, we have a formal frameworkestablishedat the beginning that this would be an attempt to examine the fate of democracy in Russia, applyingsome of the critical broader literature to the Russian case. This second objective is achieved at best fitfully. The worksets out to explain the gap between the democratic ideal and the somewhat sordidresultsseen in post-CommunistRussia. Other scholarshave provided a whole bestiaryof 'democracywith adjectives',whereasthe present authorslimit themselvesto a detailed discussionof institutionaldevelopments and intra-elite conflicts from the time Gorbachev came to power in i985 to the late i99Os. The story they have to tell is a familiar one, but they have contributedto the literaturein three main ways. First,they provide us with a relativelythorough overview of the main strandsof thinkingdeveloped in the secondary literature,mainly by Anglo-American social scientists.They have done a thorough trawl of the mainstream English-language literature, and appliedthisto good effect. Secondly, they have a suregraspof the aetiology of REVIEWS 373 the post-I985 reformprocessin the country.The historicalbackgroundof the late Soviet years is presented in a concise and convincing manner, and the broader context of the Gorbachev-El'tsinreforms is suggested. Thirdly, and this is the meat of the book, every twist and turn of the Gorbachev-El'tsin years is examined, includinga usefulreminderof the personalchallengesthat faced the two leaders. This is largely a narrative account which leaves out many of the underlyingintellectualissues.The contrastbetween liberalization and democratizationiseffectivelyemployed,but thisonlyscratchesthe surface of the significanceof the process. As with so many books of this type, the evolution of policy, and the contrastingpolitical and ideological schools, are not discussedin great depth. Instead the discussion shifts to another plane, as it were, by analysing the forces promoting democracy, and the impediments that the democratization projecthas encountered.At the heartof theiraccount is the stuntedgrowthof civil society. Although their assessmentis relativelybleak, the retention of the question markin the title suggeststhat the end of the storyof the democratic adventurein Russia has not yet been told. Although the authorsare sensitive to the nuancesof the concept of civilsociety,itsoperationalizationin thisbook stillcarriesechoes of the starkcivil societyversusthe state approachof earlier times. The attempt to divide civil society into three groups, ranging from private associations through to general advocacy organizations and up to political representativebodies is useful, but does not get us very far, and in any case is hardly referred to in the bulk of the analysis. Civil society is a concept that...