People associated with the new system defend it as an essential affirmation of state authority, laying a foundation for a system that will be fundamentally democratic, subject to the sanction of elections, and resembling (in the comparison these Russians offer) France's Gaullist government of the 1960s.
The Gaullist Fifth Republic was in a sense an elected monarchy. The president was conceded all but total power over the foreign and defense policies of the state. He laid down the general line of domestic government, but was not the head of government. The actual government was formed by the parliamentary majority under a prime minister accountable for his own policies.
To many liberal Russians as well as outsider observers, the Putin system increasingly resembles a revised and modernized version of the old Soviet system, with an emphasis on nationalism and economic power rather than ideology. Putin himself has asserted that there are fewer black pages in the history of the USSR than in the past of the United States, citing racism, the atomic attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Gulag and Stalinist terror and purge are wiped from his translation of the Soviet record, although named and condemned by his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had even, at one point, proposed a Nuremberg-style trial of the Soviet regime.
In the opinion of one of the most acute Western correspondents in Moscow, Laure Mandeville, Putin seems to want to establish in people's minds the idea of a continuity of his government with a Communist past that in his version is purged of its crimes and glorified for its defeat of Nazi Germany. This is meant to lend legitimacy to his own policies.
However, the purge of past iniquities is incomplete, some of the most characteristic of them reappearing under Putin. Recently a critical journalist, Larissa Arap, was sent to internment in a psychiatric institution - a form of punishment drawn from a totalitarian Soviet past. There have been physical assaults on other journalists as well as dissidents and opposition demonstrators, and unsolved murders of certain critics of the government.
Television, films and entertainment are increasingly "patriotic," especially in celebrating heroes of the Soviet intelligence services, in which Putin served, which are honored annually with a "Day of the Chekists" (a reference to the original Bolshevik secret police).
It is argued that Russians, after their bitter experience of modern history, consider the kind of liberal and humanitarian norms pressed upon them by the West as utopian, and the West's pressures hypocritical.
They are ready to believe that the "color revolutions" in the states of Russia's "new abroad," encouraged by Washington and Brussels, are an attempt to surround and isolate Russia politically. And they see the U.S. withdrawal from arms treaties; the push of NATO toward Russia's borders; American military activities in the Caucasus; its new bases in Central Asia, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland; and the missile shield Washington wants installed in Poland and the Czech Republic, as tantamount to military aggression.
As former Gorbachev adviser Andrei Grachev has written, for the first time since Communism's fall, the West is seen in Russia as a power center "which has to be dealt with, but with which Russia does not share a common future."
The West European members of the European Union who have important economic and energy links with Russia are inclined to optimism (or hopefulness) concerning the future of Euro-Russian relations, and express considerable tolerance of current repressive trends under Putin, noting the disastrous economic and political consequences of the ruinous version of market capitalism installed in the country under American influence after Gorbachev's fall.
The newest EU members, which are neighbors of Russia, the Baltic states and Poland, and such candidates for EU membership as Georgia, insist that Russia is reverting to the same oppression and hostility to the liberal West that characterized much of its history, and of which they were the 20th century victims.
In their anger against Russia and aggressive support for Bush administration hard-liners, they are inclined to forget that Putin's Russia is the only Russia they - and the rest of us - have. It's the one that has to be dealt with, whatever it is, or becomes. And the countries that are its neighbors suffer the curse of geography. They can't move someplace else. Their American friends live a continent away. Moreover, American administrations change, and the next one in Washington may well abandon the Bush line on Russia. That's what national interest can do.
