This part of our study concerns a pivotal period in Russia's political rebirth, commencing with the ‘beginning of the end’ for the communist order and concluding with the ‘end of the beginning’ for the reappearance of political life. The four chapters in this section approach this double-sided process from two directions. Chapter 3 serves as a general introduction to those that follow. It surveys the party-state's grand attempt at reform, perestroika, from three different perspectives that characterize it, respectively, as: first, a reform designed to ‘renew’ the socialist system; second, a variant of the transnational process of transition from authoritarian to democratic government; and third, the initial stage of a systemic transformation that remains ongoing at this writing. Although each of these vantages proves useful, that provided by the concept ‘transformation’ seems most suitable to our purposes. It allows us to consider perestroika from the perspective of structural relations and thus to develop the relationship between civil society and property order that explains why the attempt at renewal had failed and why a transition of the Soviet system to democracy had been aborted. The remaining chapters make concrete the abstract discussion of these questions contained in Chapter 3. Each recalls our categories of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ structures and illustrates in a specific instance how the weak structures associated with the Soviet form of organization proved incapable of transformation.

Chapter 4 focuses on the mass media under the impact of glasnost.