Robert C. Tucker

We will all agree that Russia and the other Soviet successor states and
also Eastern Europe are in a time of transition. When did this period
begin for Russia?

It may seem that it began in 1991 with two historic events: First, the
August Revolution, when a group of top Soviet leaders, acting without
Mikhail Gorbachev, sought and failed to keep the then weakening Soviet
regime in existence by declaring a state of emergency, after which an
apparatchik turned anti-Communist, Boris Yeltsin, took over predomi-
nant power in Moscow in his capacity as recently elected president of
the Russian Republic; and second, the quiet coup that Yeltsin engineered
in December by meeting with his Ukrainian and Belorussian fellow lead-
ers, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, at a hunting lodge
near Minsk, where they liquidated the USSR by founding in its stead a
"Commonwealth of Independent States" (CIS), which did not then and
has not even now become a state formation in its own right. At the end
of December 1991, Soviet President Gorbachev was forced to relinquish
the seat of authority in the Kremlin. His abdication meant the end of the
Lenin political dynasty and of Soviet power.

That is one view of the beginning. Another sees the transition period
as having begun in 1985, when Gorbachev took over as CPSU general
secretary with an inner commitment to systemic reform, to a reformation
of the Soviet order more fundamental than the reforms of the
Khrushchev years. If General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko had been
succeeded in 1985 by some other more conservative member of the Polit-

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