I have to agree, while I don't have first hand experience I've corresponded regularly with several people in the Moscow area (around my age) in regards to other pursuits (e.g. gaming). The impression I get from them is of what is going on in Russia now as more of a prelude to democracy. What that means I'm not entirely sure, but at least some people there do feel optimistic.

Agreed. It is natural that Russia, who entered the "Democratic" league not even twenty years ago, faces internal growth challenges.

The United States, after all, faced a plethora of internal struggles itself in the wake of historic shifts: Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution, and Prohibition.

Racial divide, robber barons, and organized crime have always been present in the United States. Granted, law enforcement, in recent years, has done a better job of checking these cancers, but the fact remains that we cannot hold Russia to a policy of perfection.

In fact, many of the things we are seeing in Russia right now are very similar in nature to what we saw in this country when our Democracy was young.

There will be raw times for Russia, but as Tolstoy argued in War and Peace, it is the will of society as a whole, not that of a few "rulers," that determines the outcome of events.

Who’s co-hosting the next pro-democracy meeting? Ahmadinejad? Hamas?

How's about Commodore Frank Bainimarama? You know, make it like a BCS bowl game at a real neutral site, but make sure they have plenty of marshmallows on hand for a possible roasting...

~OGD~

ps: On the bright side... I here tell, that at the very least there's lovely sunsets down there . . .

But of course.

That's been the definition of democracy since the Thermidorian Reaction or at the least, since the assault on the Paris Commune.

Move along, folks; nothing to see, here.

. . . election results are preordained.

. . . challenging the policies of the incumbent authorities can now be interpreted as a violation of the law.

The ruling elite . . . [alienates] the more advanced and entrepreneurial elements of the population.

The authority of the Kremlin . . . is unconstrained.

. . . Kremlin [is in the process of] dismantling of representative democracy.

. . . there's no more law or order about his regime than there was in Boris Yeltsin's "chaotic" Russia.

. . . the executive and legislative branches filled with loyalists who need not worry about public accountability.

Oh, that Masha Lipman. Such a depressive. Maybe ideasculptor can take her to lunch and cheer her up.

I don't know anything about Russia that I haven't seen in the media, but as near as I can tell Russia is still a very centralized nation. It has a number of very powerful men who are fighting to reach the top of that centralized nation, and there are as yet no generally accepted rules of how the fights need to be conducted. This is what gives it a lot of the appearance of chaos. The rebellion in Chechnya doesn't help, either. Not as big as our Southern Rebelliion, but certainly a nasty civil war.

But at the same time, Russia does not seem to be the totalitarian state where everyone is monitored and assigned their way of life as it was under Stalin in the USSR.

Russia is a naturally centralized nation. It has always been surrounded by enemies and had no natural barriers to keep them out. From the time the Mongols pulled back East, it has always had to have a centralized government to survive. The needs of a modern industrial state require some decentralization and the rule of law. History and tradition make this a very scary proposition for much of the nation. The idea of what can effectively be decentralized and what must remain centralized is unclear, and most managers prefer central control anyway.

Also, what functions belong in government and what functions belong in the market economy is not yet clear. We don't have a settled consensus on this here in the U.S. yet, either.

What I don't know it whether Russia has an independent judiciary with the power to overrule the legislature and the President. Until it does, it will not be a nation under a rule of law. This, the primitive nature of the Commercial Code, and the battle between the powerful men for overall control are the source of the chaos which is obvious - and very frigntening to a nation that has always had a centralized government.

Then consider that the problem Russia faces becoming a democracy is the opposite of the one the U.S. faced. The U.S. had to centralize certain functions previously either handled at the state level or not handled at all. Russia has to determine what can be decentralized from what was previously a highly centralized totalitarian govenment.

It'll take a while to get the theory right, and until that is done, there will not be an effective independent judiciary and the rule of law. At the moment it is in much the position as the U.S. was under the Articles of Confederation, but coming from the totalitarian rather than the totally decentralized. It took South Korea and Taiwan two generations to achieve what looks like democracies. Russia has had 18 years.

It will be a while.

Silly advocates of Liberal Democracy ... they want democracy as a check against tyranny by a minority and civil rights under the rule of law as a check against tyranny by a majority.

However, it must be said that while the institution of elections persist, there is the hope of using them to gain concessions, even if the President is a democratically elected caudillo.

I've used this quote before, and it's apt to use it again:

George Marshall: [on the Marshall Plan] "Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist."

The key point here is Marshall's emphasis that favorable economic conditions are a prerequisite for positive political and social developments. Since then, Armatya Sen has brought a refined academic slant on the same topic with his seminal work on freedom and economic development.

I don't know if the Bushies are ignorant of Marshall and Sen, but if they are it would at least explain why they don't understand that political freedom on its own is not sufficient as an international development package. And further, both theoreticians (Sen) and practitioners (Marshall) seem to agree that economic development should lead political and social advances.

The bottom line is the bottom line - we are going to pay up to see political progress in the Middle East (and other regions suffering from various freedom deficits). But considering how much we have been prepared to spend on a hopeless military endeavor, and what several hundred billions could achieve in economic development... well, it's time to look at other ways of spending our foreign policy budget.

Ps. As much as Russia is significantly advanced from 15 years ago, and economic growth and development has been rapid and significant under Putin, there's no getting away from Ivo's point about the decline of the rule of law. One can make any number of moral calls to rationalize what Putin is doing, but none of them square with what we would recognize as acceptable by Western standards defined by the rule of law.

I remember in the 80's, a Professor teaching Latin American history quoting someone as saying after a military takeover of government, "What is this talk of coup de etat? That's silly. This is a good, old fashioned golpe de estado."

There may be a number of Latin American models for what Putin is attempting. Mexico, after all, eventually made the transition after their Revolution from strong man rule to term-limited strong man rule, with the President "tapping" his successor after the fourth year of his single six year term. More recently, the ruling party "tapped" another party as its successor.

With free and fair elections taken as the source of government legitimacy, the worst electoral abuses of the days of PRI "minority of votes cast / majority of votes counted" rule have in fact been checked or eliminated, and it is that understanding of political legitimacy that leaves the door open for the evolution of a healthy and democratic political system.

Indeed, we may see in another six or twelve years the election of an "untapped" President, and I have even higher hopes that before that happens in Mexico, it will have already happened in the US.