Politics & Power Quote by Richard Lugar

“Despite” does most of the work here. Lugar is acknowledging the easy scoreboard metrics of democratization - elections held, censorship eased, people traveling, speaking, consuming more freely - and then puncturing the comforting assumption that those things automatically add up to durable democracy. The sentence is built like a warning label: yes, the packaging says “free,” but check the ingredients.

The intent is strategic as much as moral. Lugar, a Cold War-era U.S. senator steeped in arms control and post-Soviet security, is speaking to an American audience tempted to treat Russia’s 1990s turbulence as a messy but completed transition. He’s arguing that democracy isn’t a one-time system install; it’s a set of institutions and habits that can be hollowed out even while the rituals continue. Elections can coexist with captured media, weakened courts, oligarchic patronage, and a security state that never truly loses its muscle memory.

“Perhaps more ambiguous now” is carefully calibrated political language: cautious on the surface, alarming underneath. It suggests not just stalled progress but regression disguised as normalcy, a period when the outward signs of openness mask a narrowing of real pluralism. By locating the danger “since the collapse,” Lugar also hints at the historical irony: the moment that should have been democracy’s sunrise may have produced a long twilight, where freedom is experienced privately but power consolidates publicly.

In the post-Soviet context - economic shock, institutional fragility, nationalist revival - the line reads less like prophecy than diagnosis: a democracy can be technically alive and functionally compromised.