In the 1990s, Russia’s experience under its first popularly elected leader, Boris Yeltsin, seemed to follow some inscrutable law of revolutionary entropy. First, Yeltsin launched a program of sweeping policies aimed at dismantling the economic remnants of the old Soviet order, itself destroyed in the political revolution of August 1991. Such “emergency decrees,” however, quickly devolved into political strife. As paralysis gripped Russia’s infant governing bodies, the next several years brought relentless economic decline, culminating in political fragmentation and the crushing of a motley uprising of extremist legislators by military force in October 1993. On paper, the events of that...

On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev gained election as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Within weeks, the new General Secretary invoked the slogan of restructuring (perestroika) in calling for the renewal (obnovlenie) of Soviet socialism.¹ Over Gorbachev’s first year, the Party leadership deployed the slogan of perestroika as watchword for a reform designed to overcome the stagnation (zastoi) of the previous twenty years, accelerate economic growth, and “revitalize Soviet democracy.” The emerging discourse of perestroika thus framed prior rhetoric hailing “mature socialism” and “the transition to full communism” as instead masking a drift away...

The watershed character of the 1989 campaign distinguished the wave of Gorbachev-encouraged social protest that preceded the specialist rebellion, from the revolutionary situation and the democratic movement that followed in its wake. The 1989 election altered the situation precisely by undermining existing institutional practices in favor of realizing previously faux institutional principles, principles whose realization in fact de-institutionalized power arrangements. In this way, the elections precipitated a conjuncture in which party-state divisions, elite conflict, and popular uprisings coincided to create preconditions for revolution identified in comparative-historical sociology.¹ As a result, the trajectory along which hundreds of millions of Soviets had...

Preoccupied with the struggle to establish dual power, many prodemocracy leaders in the soviets by mid-1990 had ceased to interact with the voluntary associations and informal networks that functioned as grassroots vehicles for their spring campaigns. A small number of peoples deputies, however, argued that the ultimate success of democratic transformation depended on the existence of a dynamic, unified, and organizationally effective democratic movement at the grassroots level. These deputies and their allies in voter associations would network the organizational unification of Russia’s democratic opposition in the fall of 1990. But in so doing, an emergentDemRossiiamovement “core” in...

Early on the morning of August 19, 1991, Russians awoke to television and radio announcements of the resignation of President Gorbachev “due to ill health” and the declaration of a “state of emergency.” The latter entailed the “disbanding of all structures and administrations…acting in violation of the USSR Constitution,” the “suspension of the activities of political parties, organizations and movements that hamper the normalization of the situation,” the banning of “rallies, protests and strikes,” and the introduction of martial law in Moscow, Leningrad, and a number of other key locations in the Soviet Union, including the Baltic republics. The announcements...

The Russian president’s opting for a “revolution from above” in early 1992—with its disregard of political movements and grassroots activism—shifted politics back toward groups clustered around the still ill-defined realms of Russia’s executive and legislative wings of federal administration. Yeltsin and his various advisors assumed the decree of policies would translate into coherent actions steered and monitored by themselves. But the operations of federal governance proved incapable of either steerage from above or administrative coherence, instead splintering into strife between the presidency and the Congress of Peoples Deputies. As governing paralysis unfolded, theDemRossiiagrass roots—lacking support...