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Michael McFaul, Russia's 1996 Presidential Election. The End of Polarized Politics. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1997, xiii + 170 pp., $17.95.
THE 1996 RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION was a fascinating event. Michael McFaul's short book (short in that the actual text only takes up 95 pages, the rest are accounted for by notes, comprehensive tables of results and the index) provides a more than serviceable introduction to the campaigns of El'tsin, Zyuganov and some of the second-rank candidates (notably Lebed' and Yavlinsky), and to some aspects of the vote. The descriptions of the Zyuganov campaign's failure to produce a coherent message, of the struggles within the El'tsin campaign etc, will be very useful for students trying to grasp El'tsin's return from the political wasteland to which he seemed permanently exiled after the 1995 Duma elections. For specialists, the chief point of interest will be McFaul's cautiously optimistic argument that the 1996 presidential election marked, as the book's sub-heading has it, `the end of polarised politics'. One consequence of the end of polarised politics for McFaul is that elections have been accepted as the only way of transferring power. In turn, and despite the serious democratic deficit of post-election Russian politics, this offers the prospect of what he calls democratic 'renewal' (p. 95).
Does this vision of the future have any merit? McFaul bases his assertion that the 1996 presidential election saw the end of polarised politics on a theoretical claim and on some speculation about the presidential election scheduled for 2000. His arguments are interesting and may even turn out to be right (we can but hope). However, I am not convinced that the 1996 election signalled the end of polarised politics, nor am...