Too Good to Be True

This is the rather flattering self-portrait of a populist leader who has already traveled quite far: Boris Yeltsin, once a protégé of Mikhail Gorbachev, is now his main, and very re

Daniel Singer

Turncoats and Scapegoats

Boris Yeltsin, the former chief apparatchik in Sverdlovsk, and Gennadi Burbulis, the former professor of Marxism-Leninism in the same town, are the men behind the prosecution in the case against

Daniel Singer

The Bloody Cul-de-Sac

Daniel Singer

The Revolution Seen Through a Glass Darkly

A film beginning with a shot of a little boy being beaten for not having learned the Declaration of the Rights of Man by heart, and closing in the overwhelming shadow of the guillotine, provides

Daniel Singer

An Optimistic Tragedy?

For years, if they wished to be honest, observers of the Soviet Union had to work like archeologists, digging below the political surface to discover real social changes taking place in the co

Daniel Singer

Yeltsin in Dubious Battle

For once Boris Yeltsin was true to his word. He had said in public that August would be the month of "artillery preparations" and September the time of the clash. On September 21, at 8 P.M.

Daniel Singer

Election ’95–Fractured France

The miracle did not happen. Dynamics, as Lionel Jospin had hoped, did not defeat arithmetic. On his third try, Jacques Chirac made it. The Socialist interlude is over.

Daniel Singer

Gdansk Showdown

In the medieval city of Gdansk, in a courtroom packed with police, three men stand in the dock.

Daniel Singer

Dawn in Poland

Dual power, Lenin wrote, cannot last long. But just how long?

Daniel Singer

The Dream and the Nightmare

"How could anyone possibly say that the October Revolution was in vain?" the poet Tvardovsky angrily told Solzhenitsyn in what now seems another age.

Daniel Singer