In December 1993, Russian voters adopted a new constitution and elected a new Parliament. In doing so they inaugurated a further phase in Russia's turbulent march towards a constitutional political order, which had begun over a century and a half earlier with the famous Decembrist uprising against the absolute rule of the Tsar. However, the outcome of the December 1993 polls has fallen far short of resolving the uncertainties which surround Russia's political future. With a significant portion of votes going to candidates of Vladimir Zhirinovskii's neo-fascist ‘Liberal-Democratic Party’, and the new government in January 1994 apparently abandoning any commitment to what Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin labelled ‘market romanticism’, the future of political and economic reform in Russia remains clouded, with one prominent reformer even asserting that reform is dead.

In the highly charged atmosphere which the election results produced, there has been open talk of a Weimar scenario for Russia. The combination of ineffectual government and economic crisis which prevailed in Germany in the early 1930s was widely blamed for permitting the rise of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party–and some would see in the votes for Zhirinovskii a similar phenomenon. Zhirinovskii's crude nationalism, hectoring rhetoric, willingness to use racialism as a mobilising strategy, and even his publication of a bizarre autobiographical tract, are hauntingly reminiscent of various steps on Hitler's path to power.