Russians, for example, rejected Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a clownish Donald Trump-like nationalist and anti-Semite, in favor of Boris Yeltsin, who had stared down tanks during the failed 1991 coup and recognized that his country’s future lay with democracy and the West. In Romania, the extremist poet Corneliu Vadim Tudor lost to a succession of corrupt pragmatists, beginning with Ion Iliescu, who had led the ouster of the country’s last communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu.