Includes bibliographical references (pages 173-177) and index.

Lev Timofeyev was one of the last dissidents to be jailed in the Soviet Union by the Gorbachev regime, and during the 1991 attempted coup he was one of a small group designated by the KGB for immediate arrest. In Russia's Secret Rulers Timofeyev shows how the Communists are successfully preserving the hidden structures of power they created during seventy-odd years of rule, and - acting like a mafia - still have hold of the essential levers of power. He describes how by creating a class of government planners and distributors who neither own nor produce property (and hence have no real stake in it), the system builds in shortages that are artificially maintained so that this class can keep its power and privileges. As a result, the black market is the economy, and not merely a feature of it. Despite the emergence of Boris Yeltsin and other democratic leaders, power, the economy, and the bureaucracy remain fundamentally in the old hands. The self-interests of the Party bureaucrats, the criminal world, the military-industrial complex, and shadowy entrepreneurs converge to a point where they are threatening democratic reform and the stability of the nation. Timofeyev shows what is happening, and buttresses his argument with a series of revealing interviews - with former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Elena Bonner, former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, American journalist David Remnick, and others. He seeks, and suggests, answers to two basic questions: Who really runs the country? And, how is the former Soviet Union likely to emerge in the 1990s?

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