Even though many in the west were crowing about these events as “the third wave of democratization,” what I kept thinking at the time was, “An economic collapse this severe will almost certainly end in fascism.”
Nils GilmanFew in the West today understand what happened to the Russian people with the collapse of Communism. Here is one statistic: in 1987-88, 2% of Russians lived on less than $4/day; by 1993-95, 50% did. Observing this as it happened was a major formative political experience for me as a young adult.