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From perestroika to Putin: a recent history of Russia's turbulent transformation from communist to post-communist nation
Revolutionary Passage
From Soviet to Post-Soviet Russia, 1985-2000
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Marc Garcelon
"Garcelon's extensive examination of DemRossiia during the critical 'interregnum' period is novel. His writing is clear and crisp, and his rigorous conceptualization and judicious interpretations, along with his rich fieldwork experience and interview data, are admirable."
—Michael Urban, Professor of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Revolutionary Passage is a cultural, social, and political history of Russia during its critical period of transformation at the end of the twentieth century. Marc Garcelon traces the history of perestroika and the rise of Vladimir Putin, arguing that the pressure Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms put on the Soviet system gave birth to movements for democratic change. He also shows that the very political arrangements that prompted the fall of Communism also killed hopes for subsequent reform.
At the turning point of this political revolution stood Democratic Russia, or DemRossiia, the principal organization of the Russian democratic movement that helped to dismantle the Soviet system and force the Soviet leadership to change course. However, as post-Soviet Russia committed itself to globalization and U.S.-style economic reforms, the country directed itself away from the Democratic reforms called for by organizations like DemRossiia, and such groups collapsed. Revolutionary Passage provides a close examination of the DemRossiia. Garcelon deftly illuminates the rise and decline of this organization, and how the processes of revolutionary change impacted both Russia and the world.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from the Introduction (pdf).
Reviews
"Revolutionary Passage is an outstanding account of the whole epoch starting with Gorbachev's reforms through the years of Boris Yeltsin until Putin's accession to power by late 1999. The book is excellent, a tour-de-force, and lucidly presented. Garcelon makes an important contribution to the understanding of the role the educated middle class, intellectuals, and experts played during Gorbachev's reforms, and how they were abandoned by Yeltsin. Revolutionary Passage offers a fine-tuned presentation of social structure of the late Soviet Union and the early years of post-Soviet Russia."
—Ivan Szelenyi, William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology and Professor of Political Science, Yale University
"The book is helpful in recalling and explaining what transpired in that turbulent period."
—Slavic Review
"This book is thus to be recommended as an appealing investigation of how Putin’s presumed self-assurance on the political stage is just as much a product of the malfunctioning that preceded it."
—The Modern Language Review
"Garcelon presents a detailed examination of an important story: the rise and fall of the Democratic Russia movement (DR). He demonstrates persuasively that the unleashing of perestroika precipitated the creation of an asymmetrical matrix of political opportunities that was advantageous to political entrepreneurs networking within the ranks of the Moscow-based intelligentsia....[O]ne of Garcelon’s major accomplishments is that his carefully crafted research, which illuminates the organizational genesis of DR and the social profile of its activists, provides a useful map of politically mobilized, late-Soviet Moscow. The other accomplishment for which Garcelon should be commended is his cogent analysis of DR’s heterogeneity."
—Perspectives on Politics
"Garcelon successfully employs the feudal model as an explanation for the failure of central authority and the later rise of violent oligarchies by the last 1990s in Russia....This work with its feudal paradigm provides both a valuable reference for the period as well as a new methodology for examining Russia’s political and economic future."
—Sibrica
Contents
List of Acronyms and Russian Terms
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Passages
1. The Specialist Rebellion in Moscow and the Genesis of a Revolutionary Situation
2. The Rise of Democratic Russia
3. Democrats on the Offensive
4. August 1991 and the Decline of Russia's Democratic Movement
5. Interregnum
Appendix: English Translation of Russian Questionnaire Used in the Survey in Chapter One
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author(s)
Marc Garcelon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Middlebury College.
Subject Categories
Sociology
Political Science and Public Policy
History
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