Interesting write up. Only thing I strongly disagree with is Putin. He isn’t so much another Stalin as Russian restorationist. If I were to pin an ideology on him it would be closer to the xenophobic national-socialism of 1930s Germany than the ‘ignite-the-world’ international-socialism of early Soviets, but without some of the extreme racism and hyper-idealism.

I did an article on Putin and Russia back in February in which I tried to determine where Russia was heading. It didn’t make the cut here at IC, but did get published at another conservative site. I had an idea then Russia might be heading for a confrontation in her own backyard (but would have thought Ukraine sooner than Georgia), and with the West regarding Russian ‘spheres of interest’. I guess it was too soon and people were more interested in Obama v. Clinton. I think I’ll dust it off and resubmit it as, now, people are interested.

Of particular relevance to your argument was an item at Heritage Foundation ( http://www.heritage.org/Research/WorldwideFreedom/bg2088.cfm ) entitled ‘Advancing Freedom in Russia’. In it, Steven Groves has a graph showing Russia’s shift toward democracy in 1990, peaking mid-1990s, and then drifting back to autocratic government. He describes this as an arc; like a rocket trying to break free of gravity, but lacking sufficient thrust to do so. Russia is a nation of people who have never quite decided they want to be Western more than they want to be powerful and respected. Given the choice, they choose the latter and they choose strong autocratic leaders to get and keep them there. Even Yeltsin had some of the autocrat about him, despite his resolve that Russia would be more Western. The 1990s democratization happened only because Russia was bankrupt, exhausted, impotent, humiliated, and unable to hold onto its empire. Both Russia’s leaders and people were nonplussed by the way world turned strongly against them and their ideology (no small credit to Reagan, Waleska and the Pope), most of the world viewing them as the problem and not the answer. I can’t stress enough how strongly most Russian apparatchiks still believed (and believe) in the power of communism to transform their country from backwater to superpower. Poverty and economic failure did not seem to penetrate this belief, only the rebellion and disapproval of ‘clients’ seems to have done that and only a little. The experiment with democracy, then, was little more than a means of staying relevant. Once Russia had its oil-wealth with which to rebuild, it quickly lost interest in Western-style democracy and our approval. Thus, Russia has reverted to type.

Tretyakov is only telling us part of the narrative, the part where he is part of the brief democratization. Before that, he must have been a loyal KBG-communist operator; else he’d have defected much sooner. Tretyakov is more likely disapproving of Putin because Putin is a pragmatist who does what he does for Russia and not for Russians (from the communist viewpoint). In Putin’s own mind, he is a patriot and uniquely qualified to restore Russia to her place. To the communist faithful (of which there are many), communism represents ‘true’ democracy and Western democracy a cheap imitation; so, where Tretyakov says ‘democracy’ read ‘communist paternalism’. Even as they wallow in oil-wealth, Russians pine poetically for the lost purity of collectivist-poverty, for the days before they were ‘corrupted by capitalism’. Ironically, it was Western concern for Russia that lead us to develop Russian-oil that Russia might quickly rejoin the community of nations, and it is that which has turned it around for Russia.