№ 2 - 2007
Gelman V.Ya.
Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire? (Post-Soviet Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective)

Why do some countries become democracies, while others move from one non-democratic regime to another? Viewing political transformations in post-Soviet countries as a “natural experiment” in regime change, the author presents an original approach to the analysis of regime changes on the post-Soviet expanse. According to his hypothesis, the diversity of variants of such changes is conditioned by the scenarios of elite conflicts, which (the scenarios), in their turn, depend on the structure (“the heritage of the past” and the distribution of resources) and the agents (the elites, their visions and strategies); those scenarios of elite conflicts in the process of regime changes, at that, do not always lead to a certain “destination”: one scenario may get transformed into another, in particular under the effect of the exogenous factors that set the structure of political possibilities. By way of primary verification of this hypothesis, the author analyzes political transformations in these three post-Soviet countries: in Russia, in Ukraine, and in Belarus.