A review of Hidden Nations: The People Challenge the Soviet Union, by Nadia Diuk and Adrian Karatnycky.
About the Author
Martha Brill Olcott, professor of political science at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, is currently a resident scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. She is the author of The Kazakhs (1987) and the editor of Religion and Tradition in Islamic Central Asia (forthcoming).
Opposition movements often boycott rigged polls rather than risk legitimizing an autocrat. It is usually a mistake. Here is the playbook for how one opposition seized the advantage.
Read the full essay here. Twenty years ago, there was a more thoroughgoing political pluralism in Russia than there is today. In some respects, the forms of democracy-including party consolidation-have…