When Russia Did Democracy

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks were shut down after only one session of the Constituent Assembly in the wake of the Russian Revolution, it was said to mark the end of Russia’s one-day experiment with democracy.

However, with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a true period of democracy was ushered in – and the result was a strange world that is scarcely believable when viewed from the era of Putin.

Political contests were fought between a bewildering array of different parties representin...