Twenty-Five Years after the USSR: What’s Gone Wrong?

(Journal of Democracy) After a quarter-century, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union looks like a de-democratizing event. Leading up to that fateful year, Mikhail Gorbachev had been one of the world’s great democratizers. In just six years after rising to the top post in one of history’s most repressive regimes, he had almost completely freed the media, launched competitive elections, and ended the Communist Party’s political monopoly. But this trend stopped in its tracks and even went into reverse when the Soviet Union broke apart into fifteen newly independent states in late 1991. In fact, if we take Freedom House measures and leave aside the three Baltic states, which were generally not recognized as being part of the USSR and soon joined the EU, there has not been a single year when the post-Soviet space on average has enjoyed the level of “political rights” (to use Freedom House’s term) that was achieved under Gorbachev. What accounts for this depressing reality? […]