Carnegie Moscow Center
Although a number of secret Soviet archives have been opened to researchers and the media, the revelation of their content has had a limited impact on popular understandings of Russian history.
Mikhail Gorbachev is a rare leader who changed not just the history of a single nation, but the history of the world by dismantling the Soviet Communist system and ending the Cold War.
Elements of the Soviet political order remain deeply embedded in modern Russian politics, regardless of whether Lenin’s body remains in its mausoleum in Red Square.
Yeltsin was a revolutionary who destroyed the old order rather than building a new system. As a result, his years in power were often turbulent, but ultimately he managed to help Russia avoid collapse and civil war.
As a revolutionary, Boris Yeltsin was ready to go much further than his predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev. In the end, however, he returned Russia to a system that put power in the hands of a single person and discredited democratic freedoms.
While Boris Yeltsin did a lot to build a state under difficult circumstances, he built it to suit his own interests and ultimately squandered his nation’s trust by not delivering on the hopes he represented.
The individual freedoms and economic freedoms achieved during the perestroika years still exist in modern Russia, but the democracy sought by Gorbachev and his allies has been replaced by a paternalistic state.