"History shows that the process of modernization leads societies to form liberal democracies with market systems. Yet some leaders insist on trying to create alternative models, even though those models are unstable and retrograde. Putin's authoritarian effort to create a managed democracy in Russia offers a good example... After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 many people expected Russia to make a rapid transition from communism to democracy... However, what followed in Russia was a period of experimentation with relatively greater liberalism under President Boris Yeltsin that led not to democracy, but the rise of Putin and an authoritarian system... Putin's authoritarian system does not mean that he has built a successful alternative to liberal democracy. Instead, the system owes its existence in part to the slow development of a middle class in Russia that normally would demand a share of power. That slow development, in turn, is largely thanks to the state's monopolization of the country's most lucrative business activities: the export of energy and other natural resources."