Condoleezza Rice:

She then weaves personal memories and history of post-Soviet Russia, particularly of the period of voucher privatization (1992-95) when the economic reforms launched by Russia's president Yeltsin became wildly unpopular. She doesn't say enough about how Yeltsin's inept and corrupt government mismanaged the privatization program. Russians coined the word "prikhvatizatsiya" ("grabification") as they witnessed state enterprises being acquired by friends of the government and/or the mafiya. At the same time that government also failed to protect people from crime and Russia's homicide rate peak at 32.6 per 100 thousand persons in 1994. At the same time Yeltsin had to deal with the civil war in Chechnya and the rise of Muslim terrorism, which began in earnest in 1995 (when Shamil Basayev took thousands of hostages in Russian villages) and peaked in 2004 (when the same Shamil Basayev killed 331 people, mostly children, in Beslan). No wonder that Russians welcomed the rise of strongman Putin. Rice points out that Putin's power comes not from Moscow itself (where he lost the election in 2012) but from the rural parts of Russia.

The next chapters are about Poland and Ukraine. Poland is where the anti-communist movement started that would eventually topple even the Soviet Union. Rice returns to the events that led to the fall of Poland's communist regime in the 1980s. In retrospect, Poland staged one of the boldest social experiments of the twentieth century, started by a humble worker, Lech Walesa, in a very Catholic country. Walesa was not an intellectual. It was Walesa that negotiated with the communist government the creation of a real parliament and the free elections of 1989 (the "Contract Sejm"). The revolution was not started by the intelligentsia. But, out of the blue, a viable and smart intelligentsia emerged in Poland right away. There were Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the prime minister of 1989, and his finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz, who plotted the transition to a market economy, and there was Adam Michnik, a strong advocate of the free press who founded Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989, there was the historian Bronislaw Geremek, a crucial figure during the negotiations with the communist dictator in 1989 (formally he was the leader of the Commission for Political Reforms of the Civic Committee), who worked out the details for a peaceful democratic transition, and in 1991 co-founded the Christian-socialist Democratic Union; and of course there were plenty of socialist intellectuals and the Catholic clergy (including the pope himself). The latter launched the conservative Radio Maryja at the end of 1991. In retrospect, it was not important that in June 1989 Solidarnosch won the elections with a landslide, but that Poland had such a vibrant and competent intelligentsia. An interesting point that Rice makes is that the EU and NATO de facto pressure Eastern European countries to develop institutions at record pace: EU accession requires liberalization of the economy and NATO accession requires democratic institutions. Once they got rid of communism, th Eastern European countries wanted to be accepted by EU and NATO, and that indirectly accelerated their democratic and capitalist evolution.

There's a chapter on Kenya's transition to democracy and a chapter on Colombia's turbulent democracy and even a chapter on Liberia's civil war.

The chapter on the Middle East is inevitably biased by her own participation and responsibilities in creating the mess that it is now. She carefully omits discussing the weapons of mass destruction and other blunders of the Bush II administration, although admitting that they (her) misunderstood Iraq. Rice correctly points out the different fates of Arab republics (Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan) and Arab monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait) but fails to provide any explanation for why the monarchies are faring better than the republics. The history of the West teaches the opposite lesson. She also doesn't mention the one big Arab republic that was untouched by the "Arab Spring" protests: Algeria. There were widespread protests in Algeria in January 2011, but the movement fizzled out quickly. I suspect that the two traumatic tragedies of Algeria's history have something to do with it: the war of liberation from France and the terrorist wave of the 1990s, both of which resulted in thousands of killings. For several years Abdelaziz Bouteflika (chosen in 1999 by the military) was probably viewed as the president who brought back stability and security, not as a selfish kleptomaniac dictator. More riots happened in 2019 against the aging Bouteflika and then against his replacement, again handpicked by the military, but again the protests didn't result in a serious threat to the regime, despite the fact that obviously it's the same "clique" that runs the country and gets rich. Rice also doesn't spend enough time discussing the outcome of all elections so far in the Arab world: Algeria 1992, Iraq 2005, Gaza 2006, Egypt 2012, Tunisia 2011. They all resulted in handing more power to the religious Muslim movements.

## collapse of totalitarian regimes

It's a book of memoirs, not of profound political science. You learn very little about how countries can transition to democracy. And that's probably because we don't know a good way, and probably because Rice's fundamental tenet, that culture doesn't matter, is wrong: it's all about the local culture. Western Europe had a rich tradition of institutions, intellectuals, science, technology and so on. The USA was founded by some of the most literate people in the world and was a vibrant multifaceted society. Latin America had the same advantages of the USA, but took a lot longer to evolve towards democracy. Maybe religion had something to do with it. The Islamic world has been a mess for a long time. If you refuse to blame Islam (a current taboo), you'll probably never understand why. China has a millennial tradition of very stable regimes, and probably few in China feel the need for democracy. Russia is a mystery: it had intellectuals and scientists to rival any other country in the world. Why it never developed stable democratic institutions is a mystery. It should be ahead, not behind, the rest of Europe. But ultimately one should understand the Russian culture to explain it. So this book fails to tell us what is different among the various cultures. That's the key factor that Rice neglects.