"Why do some countries become democracies, while others move from one non-democratic regime to another? Viewing political transformations in post-Soviet countries as a “natural experiment” in regime change, the author presents an original approach to the analysis of regime changes on the post-Soviet expanse. According to his hypothesis, the diversity of variants of such changes is conditioned by the scenarios of elite conflicts, which (the scenarios), in their turn, depend on the structure (“the heritage of the past” and the distribution of resources) and the agents (the elites, their visions and strategies)