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What happens when a 21st-century entity, the European Union, faces the challenge of a 19th-century power, Russia? Conflicts are already taking shape—in disagreements over Kosovo, Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia; in conflicts over gas and oil pipelines; in nasty diplomatic exchanges between Russia and Britain; and in a return to Russian military exercises of a kind not seen since the Cold War.
Last summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russian strategic flights would permanently resume with the mission of protecting Russia. Protect it from whom? Although Putin has never identified the enemy that sparked the resumption of these flights after a fifteen-year hiatus, implicitly the antagonist is the only other country with a similar air capability—the United States.
Since communism failed as an economic system, Russia and China have had to embrace free markets. But hopes that reform of communist economies would produce western-style democracies have been shaken.
The stepped-up harassment of the British Council in recent days signals a new low in Russia's post-Cold-War relations with the West and a further slide toward Soviet-style isolationism.
Under post-Soviet Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, the state did not govern, the economy shrank, and the population suffered. Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.
Time Magazine named Russian President Vladimir Putin its "Person of the Year" last week. In announcing the magazine's choice for special recognition this year, Time's managing editor, Richard Stengel writes, "if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin." Stengel is merely joining the chorus of voices in an increasingly conventional narrative praising Putin for Russia's apparent revival where it isn't clear at all that any praise is actually due him.
Michael McFaul, senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment's Russia and Eurasia Program, takes on the argument that Vladimir Putin's strong hand has been responsible for Russia's economic resurgence. Noting that "the positive change that has occurred between the 1990s and the last several years has little if anything to do with Putin," Dr. McFaul argues that the Putin administration's concentration of state power has actually impeded economic growth, not encouraged it.
After President Vladimir Putin said last month that Russia would not allow other countries "to poke their snotty noses into our affairs," we should face the fact that security relations with the West are in a shambles. Putin, who is fond of tough-guy slang, used the colorful phrase when he accused the United States of pushing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to decide against sending observers to the State Duma elections on Dec. 2.
It is a hypocritical shell game where Kremlin political strategists dragged political heavyweights onto the ballots to serve nothing more than a decorative function. Then, after the elections, they were replaced by others who are unknown or even unpopular with the voters.
Russia-watchers breathed a sigh of relief Monday with the news that Vladimir Putin had selected his successor. Finally, we knew the name of Russia's next president: Dmitry Medvedev. The initial consensus was, it could have been worse. But what we learned on Monday is dwarfed by what we still do not know about Russia's immediate future.
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