With an elite that seeks only to protect its own interests, and without any alternative force in society, crisis is the only thing capable of stirring the swamp.

The Russian system today has only two ideas: national egotism and personal enrichment. But Russians are beginning to ask: Is our might a delusion? And who is going to make us rich, and how?

What will it take for Russia's political class and society to realize that the current paradigm of development leads to a dead end?

Yeltsin's revolutionary rhetoric helped him create the appearance of a complete break with the past, but that break was never as clean as was imagined at first, nor could it have been. Yeltsin's destruction of the Soviet state looks less like a revolution than a palace coup.