Three interests of mine have shaped this book: the fulfillment of human rights under the rule of law, the democratization associated with human rights, and Soviet communism as system and legacy. Together, progress and regress in human rights and democratization have shaped the ordeal of freedom in the post-Soviet states. That ordeal means a difficult time for freedom there and for their inhabitants. The “universality” of human rights is more sorely tested in post-Soviet states, generally, than it is in the post-communist states of Eastern Europe.

The rise of Nazism and Soviet communism raised questions as to whether totalitarian regimes...

Humans’ capacity for dealing with the burden of choice that is freedom has been questioned from Plato to Freud and beyond. Should choice rest with a small elite or can it be entrusted to the community as a whole? Dostoyevsky’s doubting Ivan Karamazov dreamed of a cynical Grand Inquisitor in Spain who captured Christ one night and told Him that He was offering humans a dangerous freedom of choice. Human beings, the Inquisitor told Christ, prefer others to make their choices, gladly surrendering freedom for bread. They clamor, “Make us your slaves but feed us.” The ending of Ivan’s dream...

Why plunge back into the past of Imperial Russia in the attempt to understand the post-Soviet present? Because as Russia wavers between past and future, in its third try for democracy, we once again confront the ambiguity between cultural determinism and democratic universalism, between a liberal Russia of the future that draws on its own prerevolutionary liberal reforms and the despotic Russia of the past.

“The political culture approach,” writes Richard Sakwa, “might suggest that the recurrent pattern of autocracy, tsarist and communist, means that democracy and civil society are somehow alien to Russia.”² Despotic Russia peers out of an...

Russia abandoned World War I through the separate peace of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, concluded with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and a puppet Ukraine on March 3, 1918. For safety’s sake, the government moved itself and the capital from Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to Moscow. After 215 years, the window on the West was closing. During the civil war and costly victory against various Russian and foreign interventionists, the new Soviet regime shut the window all but completely.

As a first step in the expected worldwide proletarian revolution, the Soviet regime carried out a political and social chistka—purge or, literally, cleansing...

Alexander Guchkov told his liberal conservative Octobrist Party during an earlier crisis of absolutism, in November 1913, “the attempt made by the Russian public . . . to effect a peaceful, painless transition from the old, condemned system, to a new order—has failed.”² Three-quarters of a century later, Russia’s successor leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev attempted a new peaceful transition from autocracy to freedom, through a vaguely defined program of perestroika (restructuring). As a member of the ruling Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Gorbachev kept in touch with an informal network of leaders and professional...

The post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe, to the west of the former Soviet Union, are successor states to the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires. The fifteen post-Soviet states cover an area that belonged almost entirely to the Russian Empire. By the end of 1991, those former republics of the USSR were free, like it or not. Majorities in the three Baltic states liked it; they regained the full independence they had enjoyed from 1918 until the Soviet takeover, and a chance to make democracy work this time around. Majorities in the newly independent states of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, and...

In the spring of 1991 I wrote that “sooner or later,” changes occurring in the USSR would bring “the emergence of democracy in most former or present parts of whatever replaces the . . . present USSR.” I quoted the historian Leonid Batkin telling David Remnick that “No dictator possesses a narcotic strong enough to put us to sleep again.”² The prognosis was only partly correct. The people in nondemocratic post-Soviet states who had advocated on the issues of the environment, minority rights, and independence found themselves silenced, or neutralized, after independence.

Universalist assumptions about democratic freedoms and rights find...

When Maare Grossman made this statement to the Estonian Popular Front Rally in Tallinn on June 17, 1988, neither my Estonian companions nor I seriously expected that in a little over three years Estonia and its Baltic neighbors would have carried their demand for equality to the point of full independence. But in March 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare independence unilaterally. As Moscow’s grip loosened, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania regained full independence in September 1991. By then, it was not the Soviet immigrants but the recently subject indigenous populations who were more equal in Estonia and...

Russia’s first attempt at democracy ended with the dissolution of the Duma (Parliament) and the collapse of tsarism in March 1917. Its successor, the Provisional Government, tried and failed to found a democratic republic in 1917 under unfavorable wartime conditions. Russia’s third try began during perestroika, when it was still the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). After independence, the Russian Federation lived through deadlock, a violent resolution of that deadlock along with major institutional changes, and local civil wars. Lack of governmental accountability, pervasive lawlessness, and grave human rights violations left Russia slipping into authoritarian rule.

Through its trials...

In his letter of resignation, Human Rights Commissioner Sergei Kovalyov told President Yeltsin, “Beginning at least late in 1993, you have consistently chosen not those decisions that would have strengthened the force of law in a democratic society, but those that revived the blind and inhuman might of the state machine which is above rights, the law, and individuals.”² Kovalyov’s criticism centered particularly on the president’s complicity in violations of constitutionally proclaimed human rights: civil rights and due process of law; economic, social, and cultural rights; and rights of minorities to equality and self-determination within the Federation. These civil and...

The present movement for human rights in Russia goes back to the mid-1960s. It was the first independent social movement in the Soviet Union after Stalin. The monitoring and demands for the release of political prisoners marked what Ludmilla Alexeyeva, the leading Russian chronicler of Soviet dissent, calls the “classical phase” of human rights activism. This aspect of its work continues. In it, the movement defends dissenters against repression and commemorates its victims. But the movement has also entered a new phase of active networking in addition to intense advocacy for economic, social and civil rights in local communities.³

Nongovernmental...