Between Gorbachev's perestroika and the Belovezh Accords that sundered the USSR, Russia experienced a political revolution. The new state almost immediately instituted a set of policies that extended this revolution to economy and society, transforming the country in a few years in ways scarcely imaginable less than a decade earlier. This chapter focuses on the characterizations of those events reflected in the consciousness of the country's political class roughly a decade later. How do they recall this revolution? What features has it acquired (or shed) with respect to situating in memory its foundational significance for a young country born of an old civilization and culture?

Interestingly, although the interview prompts did not include the term “revolution,” some twenty respondents nonetheless used that word in one way or another to describe the events just mentioned. In a number of instances, it popped up in their replies to the final question that they were asked concerning their relations then and now to the events of August 1991 (the failed Soviet coup d'état and the resistance to it) and the Belovezh Accords concluded in the following December.