Lilia Shevtsova, Strobe Talbott, Pavel Voschanov, Yevgenia Albats, Boris Fyodorov, Wayne Merry, Thomas Graham, Sergei Kovalov and Arseny Roginsky offer their thoughts on Russia's future course.

Both optimists and pessimists can find evidence to support their views on the progress of democracy in Russia maintains Lilia Shevtsova, in this concluding chapter from her book, Yeltsin's Russia--Myths and Reality. Shevtsova is a senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment's Russian and Eurasian Program and one of Russia's best known and most respected political analysts and writers.

Underlying Kennan's opinion on Russia's current woes is a perspective and emphasis which views Russia in context: seven decades under Communism are not to be put right in a single decade, nor even a generation. Kennan has been a leader in U.S. diplomacy and U.S.-Soviet policymaking since the 1930s, and is a former ambassador to the Soviet Union.

This autumn 1999 article by Leon Aron--author of the biography Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life--marshals statistics and polls to argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom in the West, Russia has not been "lost" to the cause of democracy and the free market. In post-Communist Russia, he concludes, "There is a great deal in today's Russia that, to the citizen of a mature liberal democracy, appears flawed or even appalling. Yet the progress is undeniable and enormous."