Democracy from scratch: Opposition and regime in Russia during the Gorbachev period

This dissertation investigates the formation of autonomous political organizations in Russia during the years 1985-91. It focuses particularly on democratic movement organizations. Empirical inquiry is based largely on interviews and direct observation undertaken in Moscow and a number of provincial cities between 1989 and 1991.;This work, which draws heavily on the comparative and theoretical literatures on democratization, social movements, civil society, and political parties, argues that the independent political organizations that emerged in Russia during the Gorbachev period created a political society of a different type. This society resembled neither the subjugated, "totalized" society of the pre-1985 period, nor the "civil" societies evident in the industrialized West and in many developing countries. This work offers an alternative model of the new Russian political society and investigates the sources of its genesis.;The causal argument put forward in this dissertation constructs a statist approach to explain the development of new societal institutions. This study emphasizes the centrality of the struggle between state institutions and democratic opposition organizations. In contrast with most of the existing literature on political change in post-1985 Russia, this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the character and development of Russia's new autonomous political society has been shaped above all by the structure, nature, and policy of the Soviet state, rather than by socioeconomic modernization, political culture and psychology, or the cumulative weight of centuries of Russian historical tradition. The study further argues that the patterns of political organization and development established during the Gorbachev period have already begun, and will continue, to exert a powerful influence over the course of regime change and the development of representative political institutions in post-Soviet Russia.