The Games Putin Plays
After a century in which Russia styled itself a revolutionary power fighting the West’s reactionary capitalists, the former K.G.B. man has sought a return to the ideological role his nation played under the czars — as a conservative bulwark against the West’s revolutionary liberals.
.. But today’s Russia, brutalized by Communism and then taken over by oligarchs and grifters, is not a traditional society in any meaningful sense of the term, and the only thing it has in common with many of its potential developing-world allies is a contempt for democratic norms. In the Romanov era, the throne-and-altar idea still had a real claim to political legitimacy. But there is no comparable claim Putin can make for his own authority, and no similar mystique around his client dictators, be they Central Asian strongmen or Bashar al-Assad.