For two decades the people of Russia have been riding a revolutionary roller-coaster. The ride has been uncomfortable, veering from hope to dismay and back again, but it has spanned the end of communism and the rise of a crude form of capitalism.

The journey is not over yet, even if Vladimir Putin, the former spy and archbureaucrat, seems temporarily to have reimposed order from the Kremlin. After the chaos of the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, who made the collapse of the Soviet Union inevitable by trying to reform it, and of Boris Yeltsin, who wielded the executioner's axe without calculating the consequences, President Putin's regime has come as a relief to many Russians.