Russia’s evolution frustrated many of the hopes that Soviet and then Russian reformers as well as liberal and well-wishing Western scholars and analysts nurtured about the country’s future from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Many does not mean all: despite all that went wrong or stayed bad, life in today’s Russia is for most people freer, more open, and more comfortable than it was in Soviet times. Yet, the Putin regime’s rapidly evolving and unpalatable ideological bundle, as well as its harsh and aggressive posture and behaviors, on both the internal and the international fronts, accounts for the bitter disappointment with Russia’s inner political evolution and foreign behavior and begs for explanations, especially in view of the high hopes raised, in the West as well as in Russia, by perestroika first and by the post-1991 reforms later on. Because historians have been busy investigating earlier periods, notably Stalinism, in the years following the collapse of the USSR, the task of understanding the present has been left mainly to social scientists. They have

中文翻译：

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1991年后俄罗斯的苏联历史的重量

从 1980 年代后期到 1990 年代中期，苏联和随后的俄罗斯改革者以及自由派和充满希望的西方学者和分析家对俄罗斯的未来抱有的许多希望，俄罗斯的演变都落空了。许多并不意味着全部：尽管发生了所有错误或一直很糟糕，但对于大多数人来说，今天俄罗斯的生活比苏联时代更自由、更开放、更舒适。然而，普京政权迅速演变和令人不快的意识形态捆绑，以及其在国内和国际战线的严厉和咄咄逼人的姿态和行为，导致对俄罗斯内部政治演变和对外行为的强烈失望，并寻求解释，尤其是鉴于西方和俄罗斯都寄予厚望，首先是改革，然后是 1991 年后的改革。由于历史学家一直忙于调查早期的时期，特别是斯大林主义，在苏联解体后的几年里，了解现在的任务主要留给了社会科学家。他们有