Two Out of Three Is Not Good Enough

McFaul
Michael A. McFaul - Ten years ago, President Boris Yeltsin and his newly minted government launched a set of revolutionary changes comparable in scale and scope with the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Like these earlier social revolutions, Yeltsin and his band of revolutionaries sought to transform the fundamental organization of the polity and economy within Russia. Their aim was to destroy the Soviet command economy and replace it with a market economy. They also aspired to crush Soviet dictatorship and replace it with a democratic polity. Unlike their counterparts in France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, Russia's anti-communist revolutionaries added an additional task -- the dissolution of the Soviet empire. In some respects, then, the agenda of change introduced a decade ago in Russia was even more far reaching than that which the Jacobins or Bolsheviks sought to achieve.