From collapse to crisis: the constitutional standoff in post-Soviet Russia, the role of the United States, and the failure of Russia’s democratic transition

The goal of my thesis is to investigate the reasons behind the Russian Constitutional Crisis of 1993 and to understand how these events fit into the broader context of the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the emergence of the modern Russian State. Furthermore, this thesis investigates what role, if any, the United States and other Western nations played in the events in Russia. This thesis begins by examining the origins of the Russian Parliament and the establishment of the Constitutional Commission in 1990, and then proceeds to study why efforts to democratise Russia instead resulted in the violence of September 21–October 4, 1993, at the cost of over 100 lives. The author concludes that the Crisis was the result of a combination of complex political factors, but ultimately the outcome of the Crisis served to severely diminish the substantial progress Russia had made between 1990 and 1993 towards a democratic ‘rule of law’ state.