Word: putin
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...elaborate charade of feigned friendship between Putin and President George W. Bush, begun several years ago when Bush testified to the alleged spiritual depth of his Russian counterpart's soul, hasn't helped. The fact that similarly staged "friendships"--between F.D.R. and "Uncle Joe" Stalin, Nixon and Brezhnev, Clinton and Yeltsin--ended in mutual disappointment did not prevent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from boasting not long ago that U.S.-Russian relations were now the best in history. Surely it would be preferable to achieve a genuine, sustainable improvement before staging public theatrics designed to create the illusion that...
America's relationship with Russia is on a downward slide. President Vladimir Putin's recent threat to retarget Russian missiles at some of America's European allies is just the latest flash point...
...Chechnya reversed the ambiguous trend toward democracy in Russia. Mercilessly waged by Putin with extraordinary brutality, it not only crushed a small nation long victimized by Russian and then Soviet imperialism but also led to political repression and greater authoritarianism inside Russia and fueled chauvinism among Russia's people. Putin exploited his success in stabilizing the chaotic post-Soviet society by restoring central control over political life. The war in Chechnya became his personal crusade, a testimonial to the restoration of Kremlin clout...
Since the beginning of that war, a new élite--the siloviki from the FSB (the renamed KGB) and the subservient new economic oligarchs--has come to dominate policymaking under Putin's control. This new élite embraces a strident nationalism as a substitute for communist ideology while engaging in thinly veiled acts of violence against political dissenters. Putin almost sneeringly dismissed the murder of a leading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed crimes against the Chechens. Similarly, troubling British evidence of Russian involvement in the London murder of an outspoken FSB defector produced little more than official Russian ridicule...
...doubtless has not escaped the Kremlin's attention that the West, including the U.S., has remained largely silent. The Bush Administration was indifferent to the slaughter in Chechnya, and after 9/11 it even tacitly accepted Putin's claim that in crushing the Chechens, he was serving as a volunteer in Bush's global "war on terror." The killing of journalist Politkovskaya and Putin's dismissal of its import similarly failed to temper the affectations of personal camaraderie between the leaders in the White House and the Kremlin. For that matter, neither has the general antidemocratic regression in Russia's political...