Sunday, July 29, 2018

The Much Diminished Russian Bear

Any assessment of Vladimir Putin’s Russia needs to stipulate that: 1) he is a corrupt dictator sitting on top of a rotten kleptocracy; 2) political freedom and democracy in Russia are imperiled; 3) the human rights situation in Russia is not good, with political opponents of the regime subject to routine harassment, arrest, and in a few cases political violence; 4) Russia under Putin has been willing to use various instruments of coercive diplomacy, from outright military force (Georgia and Ukraine) to wielding cyber and propaganda weapons (Estonia, Ukraine, and the United States).

But even with these stipulations, there remains a yawning gap between the apocalyptic rhetoric about the Russian threat and the reality of the domestic regime and foreign policy behavior of contemporary Russia. Moreover, many of the recommendations that those hyping this threat bruit about are in fact precisely the sorts of steps that strangled the baby of Russian democracy in its cradle and today threaten to turn an increasingly frosty peace into a hot war.

Consider the domestic political situation in Moscow. It is true that Russia has become an oligarchy dominated by President Vladimir Putin and bolstered by his former security service colleagues and nouveau riche crony capitalists. Political participation is constricted and opponents of the regime are regularly harassed, sometimes jailed, and on occasion killed. On the other hand, Russia is no longer the totalitarian state that the Soviet Union was under Josef Stalin. Communism killed millions during the Soviet period; lethal political violence in Putin’s Russia is deplorable but relatively rare, the murders of a few journalists, political opponents, and defectors notwithstanding

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-much-diminished-russian-bear/ 

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