Boris Altshuler represents what is left of Russia's intelligentsia - men and women who risked their lives fighting for civil and human rights for the past two decades. Altshuler says he fears Russia's entering in which the democratic gains he and Sakharov and the other dissidents fought for in danger of being lost. For Russian people democracy is synonym of criminal anarchy. They never saw democracy as working rule of the law mechanisms. They don't know what it is.
History is a chain of missed opportunities.
Only stupidity of some people in 1917 in Russia permitted Bolsheviks to come to power. There is a growing feeling that Russia's democracy is fragile and under siege. President Boris Yeltsin, the founder of modern democratic Russia, spends most of his days in the hospital. A former communist spy Chief, Yevgeny Primakov, is prime minister and critical of most recent free market economic reforms. Crime and corruption are rampant.