Twice in the winter of 1999-2000, citizens of the Russian Federation flocked to their neighborhood voting stations and scratched their ballots in an atmosphere of uncertainty, rancor, and fear. This book is a tale of these two elections—one for the 450-seat Duma, the other for President. Despite financial crisis, a national security emergency in Chechnya, and cabinet instability, Russian voters unexpectedly supported the status quo. The elected lawmakers prepared to cooperate with the executive branch, a gift that had eluded President Boris Yeltsin since he imposed a post-Soviet constitution by referendum in 1993. When Yeltsin retired six months in advance of schedule, the presidential mantle went to Vladimir Putin—a career KGB officer who fused new and old ways of doing politics. Putin was easily elected President in his own right. This book demonstrates key trends in an extinct superpower, a troubled country in whose stability, modernization, and openness to the international community the West still has a huge stake.

"This is an excellent book, and an unusually valuable contribution to the growing literature on Russian electoral behavior. It brings together the skills and knowledge of two top scholars of Russian politics, and does so in an accessible, crisply written style. It will be a standard source on this election cycle for a long time." —Thomas F. Remington, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, Emory University

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"This is one of those rare books that combines policy relevance with the kind of argumentative rigor that will satisfy even hard-core social scientists. Written by two of the West's best known academic specialists on Russian politics, it is almost certain to become regarded as one the best (if not the best) books on the 1999-2000 election cycle." —Henry E. Hale, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

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"This is the best analysis to date on Putin's politics. Unlike so many other books about Russian politics, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy uses statistics from polls and political analysis to illustrate how things really are." —Anders Aslund, Director, Russian & Eurasian Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"Timothy J. Colton is professor of government and Russian studies in the Department of Government and director of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. His previous books include Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Harvard, 1995), named best book in government and political science 1995 by the Association of American Publishers. Michael McFaul is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, the Peter and Helen Bing senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and an associate professor of political science at Stanford University. A prolific author, he is one of the world's leading specialists on democracy development in the former Soviet states."