Russia Under Putin: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Issue Date July 2000
Volume 11
Issue 3
Page Numbers 19-33
file Print
arrow-down-thin Download from Project MUSE
external View Citation

Read the full essay here.

Does the election of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president represent a fundamental turn away from democracy or merely a temporary setback? Although Putin’s apparent indifference to democracy is worrisome, it would be premature to conclude that democracy is lost in Russia.

About the Author

Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, is professor of political science at Stanford University, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His most recent book is From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (2018).

View all work by Michael McFaul

Further Reading

Volume 24, Issue 3

Putin versus Civil Society: The Long Struggle for Freedom

Today’s Russian protest movement in many ways resembles past civil-rights and civil-resistance efforts in other parts of the world, from its commitment to nonviolence to its key demands—a vote that…

Volume 5, Issue 2

Is Russian Democracy Doomed? A Communist Setback

Read the full essay here.

Volume 18, Issue 2

Another Russia? Battling KGB, Inc.

The Putin regime is plunging Russia into a deepening crisis. It is time to end the fiction that today's Russia is a democracy.