“Freedom House launched a special report, Promise and Reversal: The Post-Soviet Landscape Twenty Years On, to mark the 20th anniversary of the failed Soviet coup of August 19, 1991. A retrospective essay examining changes in the state of political rights and civil liberties in the former Soviet Union over the last two decades, as well as graphs and rankings that illustrate the region’s performance in the annual Freedom House publications Freedom in the World and Freedom of the Press, highlight that there is a serious and disturbing failure to embrace democratic institutions in most of the post-Soviet region.”