No Apology for Putin
WASHINGTON — After a brief flirtation with democracy, Russia is retreating into tyranny. President Vladimir V. Putin is displaying his KGB pedigree when he muzzles a free press, stifles capitalism and re-creates one-party rule. His exploitation of the Beslan school tragedy -- in which Chechen terrorists killed at least 339 civilians, half of them children -- to expand his political powers and consolidate control of the United Russia party demonstrates his intent to crush basic freedoms. The 115 American and European foreign policy experts, neoconservatives and politicians, including Sens. John McCain and Joseph R. Biden, warn in a signed public statement addressed to Putin that "the leaders of the West must recognize that our current strategy toward Russia is failing."
Nothing, however, could be more mistaken than to write off Russia. Its experiment with democracy isn't over. It's barely begun. Russia should be judged as a struggling Third World country, not by the standards of an advanced democracy. To accuse Putin of abandoning Russian democracy is tantamount to saying that a plane that never got off the ground crashed. Far from being an extremist, Putin is a moderate in an increasingly radicalized Russia.
For one thing, few Russians look back with fondness at the Wild West capitalism of the 1990s that Western liberals and neoconservatives now hail. Under generally incompetent former President Boris N. Yeltsin, a powerful mafia of businessmen and KGB agents took control of the government. As Janine R. Wedel showed in her book "Collision and Collusion," U.S. encouragement of an overnight transition to capitalism was a disaster for average Russians and a bonanza for Yeltsin's cronies, who plundered the country's assets.
Putin would have none of this. His measures to crack down on the oligarchs -- including Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now on trial for corruption -- brought an end to the patronage power that afflicted Yeltsin's regime. Since then, Putin has not embraced autarky, but he has remained open to Western investment; on Wednesday, the U.S. oil company ConocoPhillips agreed to pay more than $2 billion for the government's remaining stake in Lukoil.
But isn't Russia under Putin a phony democracy? Once again, the picture is murkier than Putin's critics would have it. "By any objective comparative standard," writes Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman in the March-April Foreign Affairs, "Western condemnations of the country's institutions are grossly overblown. Russia's politics have been among the most democratic in the region."
