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Depending on the circumstances, modern capitalism wraps itself in totalitarian, authoritarian, and democratic dresses. But it is widely believed that (representative) democracy is the only political form that allows the majority of the country's citizens to exercise their freedom of choice in selecting their representatives. By dealing exclusively with the questions of democracy in choosing U.S. presidents, this chapter makes an attempt to analyze the soundness of this assertion.

Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dacha is a Russian term for a country house (cottage, shack) used for summer habitation by Russian town-dwellers, or dachniki. With the societal changes that have brought lower and lower levels of society into the field of the dachniki, the dacha has been playing an increasing role in channeling Russian people's energy away from the political sphere. Being a repository of enjoyment and entertainment for the relatively few and serving as economic and spiritual escapism for the many, the dacha, consequently, could be hampering the creation of a civil society in Russia.

Based on more than 100 years of Russia's social, economic, and political experience and delving into its political parties’ subjective intentions, the chapter makes an attempt to examine the relevance to the country's twentieth to twenty-first reality of their theoretical battles in which parties of the present have been proclaiming their programs.

Mandi Bane is a Ph.D. candidate, in the Department of Sociology, University of Michigan. Her areas of academic interest are social change, globalization, race and ethnicity, comparative-historical and ethnographic methods, social movements, and Latin America. Her dissertation is a multiscalar, historically grounded study of indigenous social movement organizations in Ecuador that contributes to the literature on multiculturalism, development, cultural citizenship, radical democracy, and neoliberalism.