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Michael McFaul reviews Inside Putin's Russia by Andrew Jack and Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millenium by Yevgeiny Primakov.
A discussion meeting with Nikolay Petrov, Scholar-in-Residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, of Russia’s newest wave of social protests.
Highly touted in both Washington and Moscow as a "strategic partnership" in 2001, the relationship has drifted and the gap between glowing rhetoric and thin substance has grown. When major policy differences emerge, as over war in Iraq in 2002-2003 and recently over Ukraine, all too easily the U.S.-Russian relationship spirals into "crisis," and the threat of a "new Cold War" looms.
The most direct way to break the grip of inefficient, self-serving interests on state power is through the election of new political players not beholden to the same interest groups that supported their predecessors. This is true regardless of political bent and is demonstrated by recent history in postcommunist Eastern Europe.
The Russian state is incapable of following Ukraine's path toward democracy, marked recently by the "Orange Revolution," due to rising authoritarian tendencies, marginalized human rights movements, and co-opted civil society.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has made "three enormous mistakes" in the last year that have underscored his obsession with complete political control.
The very first question Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar asked Secretary of State-nominee Condoleezza Rice was on his efforts to streamline and improve the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation and disarmament programs: "Does the administration support this legislation?" Rice responded enthusiastically, "I really can think of nothing more important than being able to proceed with the safe dismantlement of the Soviet arsenal, with nuclear safeguards to make certain that nuclear weapons facilities and the like are well secured."
Rice also agreed to put accelerating the program on the agenda of the next Bush-Putin meeting, and endorsed the early passage of the Law of the Sea Treaty. We provide, below, a full excerpt of the Lugar-Rice exchange at this hearing, held January 18, 2005, and links to the full hearing transcript.
The term "soft authoritarianism" has replaced "managed democracy" in describing Vladimir Putin's regime. Apart from the campaign against the Yukos oil enterprise and its executives, Putin has been sparing with repression but there have been alarming signs that the regime may be slipping toward harder methods.
Inauguration - Four more years of unfettered Bush may sound like a disaster for America and the world, but both the man and his team are likely to see their second-term ambitions frustrated on all sides. By Anatol Lieven
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