No Apology for Putin

After a brief flirtation with democracy, Russia is retreating into tyranny. President Vladimir V. Putin is displaying his KGB pedigree when he muzzles a free press, stifles capitalism and re-creates one-party rule. His exploitation of the Beslan school tragedy -- in which Chechen terrorists killed at least 339 civilians, half of them children -- to expand his political powers and consolidate control of the United Russia party demonstrates his intent to crush basic freedoms. The 115 American and European foreign policy experts, neoconservatives and politicians, including Sens. John McCain and Joseph R. Biden, warn in a signed public statement addressed to Putin that “the leaders of the West must recognize that our current strategy toward Russia is failing.”

Nothing, however, could be more mistaken than to write off Russia. Its experiment with democracy isn’t over. It’s barely begun. Russia should be judged as a struggling Third World country, not by the standards of an advanced democracy. To accuse Putin of abandoning Russian democracy is tantamount to saying that a plane that never got off the ground crashed. Far from being an extremist, Putin is a moderate in an increasingly radicalized Russia.

For one thing, few Russians look back with fondness at the Wild West capitalism of the 1990s that Western liberals and neoconservatives now hail. Under generally incompetent former President Boris N. Yeltsin, a powerful mafia of businessmen and KGB agents took control of the government. As Janine R. Wedel showed in her book “Collision and Collusion,” U.S. encouragement of an overnight transition to capitalism was a disaster for average Russians and a bonanza for Yeltsin’s cronies, who plundered the country’s assets.

Putin would have none of this. His measures to crack down on the oligarchs -- including Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now on trial for corruption -- brought an end to the patronage power that afflicted Yeltsin’s regime. Since then, Putin has not embraced autarky, but he has remained open to Western investment; on Wednesday, the U.S. oil company ConocoPhillips agreed to pay more than $2 billion for the government’s remaining stake in Lukoil.

But isn’t Russia under Putin a phony democracy? Once again, the picture is murkier than Putin’s critics would have it. “By any objective comparative standard,” writes Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman in the March-April Foreign Affairs, “Western condemnations of the country’s institutions are grossly overblown. Russia’s politics have been among the most democratic in the region.”

Numerous elections have taken place since 1991, and more Russian voters have gone to the polls than their U.S. counterparts. The elections weren’t untainted. Far from it. But they were vigorously fought, and numerous parties gained seats in Parliament. Putin’s move to slash the powers of regional governors by making them appointive rather than elective merely recognizes the reality that they were already beholden to Moscow. In any case, the real battles take place in Moscow, not in regional backwaters.

Nor does Putin’s foreign policy resemble the imperialist one that his Western critics detect. The Russian leader has accomplished the dubious feat of making the horrendous situation in Chechnya he inherited even worse. At some point, as Russia scholar S. Frederick Starr notes, Putin must acknowledge reality and come to an accommodation. But Russia’s announcement of a preemptive-strike policy on “terrorist bases” in the Caucasus, Central Asia and other areas shouldn’t raise eyebrows in the United States. Putin is simply following in President Bush’s footsteps. Given U.S. oil interests in the Caucasus, it’s unlikely that Putin will risk instability in the region by launching big military strikes.

The current strategy toward Russia, then, isn’t failing. Instead of demonizing Russia, Bush correctly recognizes that the best way to preserve U.S. influence in Russian affairs is to cooperate with Moscow on nuclear nonproliferation and push the country toward reform. With terrorists seeking nuclear weapons, the last thing Bush should do is jeopardize Russian cooperation in safeguarding uranium stockpiles.

What’s more, it is unclear that there is a viable alternative to Putin. Though he has cracked down in unpleasant ways, his communist and fascist opponents make him look like George Washington. If Putin were to vanish and be replaced by a totalitarian, there would be real cause for alarm.

Yet such U.S. neoconservatives as Robert Kagan accuse the Bush administration of coddling Putin. Bush, Kagan recently wrote in the Washington Post, should begin “taking tangible actions in the economic and political spheres to express U.S. disapproval.”

No, he shouldn’t. Backing Russia into a corner by curbing trade or imposing sanctions on it might be emotionally satisfying, but it would be counterproductive. The U.S. doesn’t need a new Cold War with Russia. It doesn’t even need a frosty one. Prodding Moscow to respect human rights makes sense. Treating it as an enemy of freedom doesn’t.