Political Charades

As a visiting scholar at Moscow State University in the fall of 1990, Michael A. McFaul collaborated with three other academics then based at the university -- Steve Fish, Sergei Markov and Nikolai Zlobin -- to start a Russian-American discussion group on democratic politics. In various forms, our tusovka continued to meet for the next decade. Many of the participants in this discussion group are the central characters in Andrew Wilson's important new book, "Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World."