A Democracy of Despots

Long-time Moscow correspondent Donald Murray analyzes the creation of the first authentic parliaments in the Soviet Union and Russia and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin used and abused the democratic institutions they helped make possible in this book. Arguing that Gorbachev and Yeltsin used the democratic institutions they created to crush political opponents and increase their own personal power, Murray concludes that the rise of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the war in Chechnya are not aberrations on Russia’s road to democracy but the logical extension and consequence of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s despotism. The Author Donald Murray was the Moscow correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Canada from 1988 to 1994.