Komandirovka vo Vlast’

Aleksandr Vasil'evich Minzhurenko was an important figure in the Russian democratic movement at the end of the 1980s and the 1990s. What makes his recently published memoir so interesting is not only that he held positions of influence in the shifting political landscape of the late Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev and the Russian Republic under Boris Yeltsin but that he came from and represented the Omsk region, a crucial Siberian provincial territory. Nearly all Westerners see political life in Russia exclusively in its Muscovite incarnation. In Minzhurenko's memoir, Russian politics at the center are seen from the perspective of a Siberian democrat, and local Omsk politics are analyzed through the eyes of an experienced activist. The book is filled with acute observations about the people, parties, and movements involved in Gorbachev's perestroika and in Yeltsin's ultimately futile attempts to install a form of sustainable parliamentary democracy in Russia. We...