№ 2 - 2004
Melville A.Yu.
On Trajectories of Post-Communist Transformations

Analysis of post-communist regimes’ political development trajectories brings the author to the conclusion that the fundamental theoretical-methodological presumption underlying the “transitological paradigm”, which interprets contemporary political transformations as advancement from authoritarian regimes towards consolidated democracy, requires serious rethinking. It’s by now absolutely clear, the author states, that there are a multitude of “exits” from communism, which, at that, lead in different directions: towards consolidation of democratic institutions and practices as well as towards their “hybrid” combination with undemocratic structures inherited from the past or, else, towards their usage as a “smoke screen” designed to conceal the formation of new varieties of autocratic rule. The fact that transit often means no “vectorial” transition to liberal democracy, but, instead, transformation of undemocratic regimes of one type into undemocratic regimes of other varieties, does not just undermine the linear logic, but, moreover, raises a most complicated task facing political science — to work out a new conceptual frame of regime changes and a new detailed and differentiated typology of contemporary political regimes, the author maintains.