He supports Bush’s reelection and yet he is pursuing a policy that is not helpful to Bush in anyway.

I think thibauld is right here. This man does not have the control we think he has.

It should come as no surprise that Yukos, Beslan, and Ukraine were hardly freak accidents. Instead, they were the fruit of Putin’s extreme centralization of decisionmaking, his systematic use of disinformation, and his abolition of all corrective mechanisms, compounded by great personal stubbornness.

Like Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, Putin has drained all power out of the formal institutions of government. His legitimacy resides only in his popularity, which will inevitably crumble after he has alienated most elites and paralyzed his government. The Putin regime has too narrow a base and is too ineffective to last. Although it is hard to predict how fast it will collapse or what will replace it, the regime is likely to unravel sooner than anybody now dares to suggest.

But Aslund’s prognosis is more sanguine, or less sanguinary, than mine. He compares Putin’s authoritarianism to Gorbachev’s:

…Ironically, Putin is forcing U.S. policy toward Russia to come full circle, back to where it was in the late Soviet period. Once again, the United States must manage the decline of a mildly authoritarian regime armed with nuclear weapons. It should be possible to do this without causing any great harm, but we should harbor no illusion that this colossus with feet of clay [Bismarck's phrase about late 19c Russia-t.] will stand up and fight with us in the war on terror.

The problem is that there is no CPSU anymore, and in its wake no effective state institutions have risen to take its place. The Duma is feckless, ditto for the courts. The army is a disaster. The security services run wild and are thoroughly corrupted. The economics ministry has a few competent officials now but the strong leaders were purged months ago. No one’s really guarding the borders and whether the WMD stocks are effectively guarded is anyone’s guess. (My own is that WMD supplies are being trafficked through the FSB/mafiya’s favorite offshore venue, Dubai.)

This is not another Soviet Union; this is something not seen since 1917, with a third-world twist. It is a failing state, this time with WMD stocks for the taking. Aslund’s optimism is misplaced.

a) the highways and

b) the border with Syria, with support from the peshmerga?

The first phase of the war is over. The next phase should be Iraqi Democrats vs Iraqi Fascists, not a continuation of a US counterinsurgency effort. Give the Iraqis prime responsibility for defending their own nascent democracy (albeit with a decent-sized US contingent in Baghdad) and help them defeat foreign-based and -supplied ba’athists with the above deployment strategy.

Syria must be the next domino to fall. We should invade the country in the very near future.

With what? Thanks to Bush the Elder and Former President Bubba, our Army was reduced from 18 divisions to the ten we had just before the liberation of Iraq. We simply don’t have the forces to invade and occupy another country while maintaining our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I agree Syria needs a hard crack on the head, however. They likely received some of Saddam’s WMDs before the war, and they’re definitely providing shelter and aid to the former Baathist leaders who are directing the head-choppers in Iraq. That cannot go unpunished.

The question is, how?

Samuel Huntington famously distinguished between “orderly” societies, which he described as those in which “the government governs”, and those in which the government is incapable of delivering basic goods and generally pursuing policy goals in a coherent and disciplined manner. The Soviet Union was orderly; today’s Russia is not.

Putin is Musharraf in whiteface. We need to start approaching Russia as a third world, failing state. As someone with Russian family, I find this is humiliating and depressing beyond words, but there it is.

There are indeed property rights– in fact over 65% of Russia’s economy is in private hands, and Russians are doing a very brisk business in buying and selling their apartments– but there is no effective rule of law.

An odd combination, I know, but then Russian capitalism isn’t really capitalism. You can’t have capitalism if you don’t have real banks or other financial intermediaries that channel savings into productive investments. Instead, nearly all Russian savings are either stuffed under mattresses or sent overseas. This is mainly a cash-based economy– not such a bad thing, as no one pays attention to accounting games the way they do here– but the principal consequences for Russian society are that

1) no one has any commitment to or faith in the future, and

I agree that Russia is not a fascist state at the moment but the fact that Putin is unilaterally removing agreed upon election procedures, ie the elections of govenors, is a sign that he is setting up a strong man dictatorship style of government. He may be just a figurehead in a KGB(or NKVD,or cheka or whatever the current letterhead for the Russian secret police) directed government. Even acknowleging the massive corruption of the Yeltsin era the fact that the government is now in control of virtually all of the media outlets in Russia and is slowly taking control of the electoral process is the beginnings of a individual or clique style dictatorship. What we can do about it is beyond my imagination.

Regarding his treatment of the Jews remember that at various times Lenin and Stalin initiated generous treatment of the Jewish people that was yanked away when Stalins inbred anti-semitism took over. The fact that he had complete control of all aspects of government, media, and business made that decision easy. Putin is not even close to that type of control but he is initiating the building blocks of that type of system and the fact that some elements of the Russian population look back lovingly on the era when the USSR strode the world as a giant and was not an international joke is very scary to me.

In other words, Russia is a case study for a democratic system functioning in the absence of property rights and the rule of law, as we understand it. Which does not negate the contentions that Russia is as eager to play the Great Game as ever.

In fact, Putin has done more than any Russian leader in history to ensure tolerance for and fair treatment of Russia’s jews. One could argue that he’s doing Russia’s jewish minority a favor by clamping down on the, unfortunately, overwhelmingly jewish circle of “oligarch” thieves, swindlers and murderers who grabbed assets representing nearly 40% of Russia’s GDP under Yeltsin.

The problem in Russia is not that the government is too strong but that it barely governs at all. Nigeria, not Weimar.