Financial Transparency Coalition

In 2004 while in a Comparative Politics class, I had a conversation with a friend, who was relatively well-versed in things political, about Freedom House’s Freedom in the World rankings. I remember referring the fact that Russia was considered a “transitional democracy” and he corrected me. “No,” he replied, “Russia is a democracy.” My friend was wrong, of course, but in retrospect that seems much more obvious than it did at the time. In 2004 Russia, with the ranking “Partly Free,” had only just begun its descent into authoritarianism under the direction of Vladamir Putin. It was that...