A democracy of despots

In A Democracy of Despots correspondent Donald Murray provides an eyewitness account of the struggle for power in the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev and in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, showing how both men used and abused the democratic institutions they helped make possible. The story he tells of the emerging democratic government is one of ambitious men and women who optimistically launched their experiment in democracy only to find themselves at war with one another and mired in the habits of rule by fiat. It was this approach, Murray argues, that eventually discredited not only presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin but also the leaders and advisers who joined them under the democrats' banner and that led many Russian citizens to support the reformed communists in the 1995 elections.