Belarus initially followed a similar path of autocratic imposition from above. Hard-liners dominated the ancien regime and the opposition, the Belarusian Popular Front (BPF), was weak. In the 1990 elections, the Communist party of Belarus (CPB) captured 86 percent of the seats in the Supreme Soviet while candidates affiliated with the BPF only won seven percent. The following year, in March 1991, 83 percent of Belarusians voted in favor of preserving the USSR. In April 1991, strikes against the state demonstrated that society was capable of mass mobilization. A few months later, the failed August 1991 coup undermined the legitimacy of the hard-liners in power who had enthusiastically supported the coup leaders. Stanislav Shushkevich, a moderate, benefited from the exogenous shock of the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev.

In contrast to more successful transitions to democracy, however, Belarus’ first post-communist leader was not a leader of the democratic opposition, but a reformer from within the system with almost no mass following. A divided elite allowed Belarus’ first post-communist vote for the presidency in June-July 1994 to be competitive, an opening cited in the third wave democratization literature as positive for democratic emergence. Instead of creating an opportunity for a democrat to emerge from society the split in Belarus allowed an even more autocratic leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, to come forward and win the election. When a political opening was created, there were no democrats in Belarus to fill it. No democrats meant no democracy. The old hard-liners from the ancien regime, while initially wary of Lukashenka, quickly moved to work with the new leader in consolidating authoritarian rule in Belarus.

A Political Grab Bag

Rather than liberal democracy, stalemated transitions—the third transition path in the post-communist world—have produced a range of different outcomes such as electoral democracy, unconsolidated democracies creeping towards dictatorship, and civil war. Transitions in which the balance of power between the ancien regime and its challengers was relatively equal have also been the most protracted and least conclusive in the region. This result is the opposite of that predicted by earlier writers on third wave democratization. Instead of stable, liberal democracies, this transition path produced unconsolidated regimes, wavering between dictatorship and democracy, during the first decade after Soviet collapse.

In response to Gorbachev’s reforms, anti-communist political groups in Russia formed and eventually coalesced into a united front—Democratic Russia. Elections in 1989 and 1990 and strikes in 1989 and 1991 helped to mobilize mass demonstrations against the ancien regime. Societal power appeared to be relatively equal to state power. New opportunities for non-traditional political action also attracted defectors and reformists from within the old ruling elite including, most importantly, Boris Yeltsin. While nationalist and democratic themes punctuated the ideology of opposition of Democratic Russia and its allies, militant nationalists never dominated the anti-communist movement. Within the Soviet state, soft-liners such as Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, and, at the time, Gorbachev offered cooperative interlocutors for Russia’s democratic challengers. Throughout the fall of 1990 and spring of 1991, stalemate appeared to force both sides towards compromise.

Yet, though sporadically attempted, a pacted transition did not result. In the summer of 1991, Democratic Russia and the regime came very close to signing the 9+1 Accord, which would have delineated jurisdictional boundaries between the central state and the republics. Before this agreement could be signed, however, hard-liners from within the Soviet state opted to interrupt the negotiated path and instead tried to impose their preferences for regime change (or a lack thereof) through the use of force. Their coup attempt in August 1991 failed, an event that allowed Yeltsin and his allies to ignore past agreements and impose new political rules—including, first and foremost, Soviet dissolution. Yeltsin’s advantage in the wake of the August 1991 coup attempt, however, was only temporary. Less than two years later, opponents to his reform ideas coalesced to challenge his regime. This new stalemate—which crystallized at the barricades again in September 1993—also ended in violent confrontation. Only after Yeltsin prevailed again in this standoff did he dictate a new set of political rules that the population ratified in a referendum. Eventually, the opposition also acquiesced to these new rules, though the scars of this protracted and violent transition still remain. The regime that subsequently emerged under Yeltsin was a fragile electoral democracy, unconsolidated and confronted by real challengers to democratic practices both within and outside of the state.

Although without the violence, the same kind of quasi-democratic, quasi-autocratic regime emerged in Ukraine in the 1990s. Ukraine managed a peaceful handover of power from one president to another in 1994, a remarkable achievement for the region. Yet, the new president, President Leonid Kuchma, gradually tried to weaken democratic checks on his executive power and construct a system of “managed democracy,” formal democratic practices, but informal control of all political institutions. Yet, because Kuchma never enjoyed the overwhelming public support, the Ukrainian president was constrained when trying to limit political autonomy and opposition. In addition, Kuchma’s inept and blunt attempts to squelch opposition voices—be it his alleged collusion in ordering the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, his jailing of former energy minister Yulia Tymoshenko, or his dismissal of the successful and popular Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko—served to mobilize even greater opposition. This societal response to autocratic government is what most distinguishes Ukraine from its Slavic neighbors. The “Ukraine without Kuchma” campaign from December 2000 to March 2001 and the results of the March 2002 parliamentary elections demonstrated that Ukrainian civil society was active and politically sophisticated. Yet, Ukraine’s regime at the end of the first decade still looked more like the Russian system and less like the consolidated democracies in East Central Europe or the Baltic states.

Exceptions to Classification

Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan do not fit neatly into the three categories of transition. The first elections in Georgia and Armenia, and to a lesser extent in Azerbaijan, produced majorities against communism, a condition that helped to produce democracy in the Baltic states. But ill-defined borders created opportunities for non-democratic forces to arise in all three countries. These territorial fights played a direct role in undermining democratic consolidation for the remainder of the decade in the three countries. Tajikistan had a relatively equal distribution of power between competing elites at the time of transition but this balance of power produced civil war, not a pacted transition to democracy. Eventually, a settlement was brokered but the result was a new autocracy, not democracy.