Good, old Brezhnev

What to make of a Russia that today grows misty-eyed over a period of tyranny and stagnation while growling that the breakup of one of the world8217;s most despotic regimes in 1991 was, as President Vladimir Putin put it, 8220;the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century8221;? What to make of a country with all the trappings of a Western-style capitalist democracy but the KGB-style cynicism to seemingly reach out and kill a critic in exile using radioactive polonium?

Russia today defies easy characterisation. It is not your father8217;s Soviet Union. Everyday Russians enjoy enormous freedom to live as they choose without worrying that neighbours will rat them out for making a joke about authorities. They can travel abroad, start businesses, watch foreign movies and surf the Internet.

And yet the Kremlin has nearly completed a seven-year project to reconsolidate power and eliminate any serious opposition. It started by taking over television, then parliament, then business. It manipulated elections and then, when that became inconvenient, eliminated voting altogether for the country8217;s 89 governors and now is considering the same for big-city mayors. It has intimidated human rights groups and assumed control of newspapers one by one.

So Russia in some ways appears a little like China, where the economy flourishes with new freedom but politics remain tightly controlled. Or in other ways, it seems like Hugo Chavez8217;s Venezuela. Or Augusto Pinochet8217;s Chile. Or all of the above. There was a reason the old monarch was called the Czar of All Russias.

The 15-year path from the demise of Gorbachev to the rise of Putin is instructive at a time when Washington is talking about planting democracy in hard soil around the world. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said this month that 8220;it takes time8221; to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy. If Russia is any guide, it may take so much time that many of us won8217;t be around to see that day.

8220;There have been some missed opportunities,8221; Rice, who was a Soviet specialist at the White House as the Soviet Union headed toward collapse, told The Washington Post. 8220;There have been some disappointments. It hasn8217;t gone in a straight line. I think that the linking up of energy and politics is pretty troubling. But it8217;s also not the Soviet Union, and personal freedoms are considerably greater than anything that we would have imagined when I was there.8221;

The optimism of those first weeks after the Soviet collapse was infectious. Gorbachev succumbed to the pressures he himself had unleashed with reforms intended to save socialism. President George HW Bush hailed the end of the Soviet Union as 8220;a victory for democracy and freedom8221; and welcomed 8220;the emergence of a free, independent and democratic Russia.8221;

Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia moved fitfully forward, but every advance seemed to met an equally powerful setback. Elections brought in a representative parliament only to trigger a tank battle with Yeltsin. State property was divested to private owners only to be stolen by newly minted oligarchs. The borders opened but the economy collapsed. Regions asserted greater autonomy but war broke out when Chechnya claimed too much. By the time an ailing Yeltsin picked a little-known former KGB colonel to succeed him on New Year8217;s Eve 1999, the country was ready for anything resembling stability.

Putin8217;s tough-fisted rule combined with soaring oil prices have transformed Russia. The country is swimming in money; its economy has grown fivefold under Putin, from 200 billion to 920 billion, and the once-destitute government has paid off its international debt full and early.

Yet that wealth has not trickled down throughout the entire country, and even where it has, a sense of unease remains, a feeling of something lost. A recent poll by the Levada Centre found that 15 years later, 61 per cent of Russians regret the fall of the Soviet Union.

And Brezhnev, who ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982, has been recast as a father figure instead of the last major figure of the Communist gerontocracy. 8220;In 1982, I could not have imagined in a nightmare that Brezhnev8217;s birth centenary would be marked with such great interest,8221; Vladimir Averin, a host at Moscow8217;s Radio Mayak, said on air recently. 8220;What is happening today is an emotional and sometimes aggressive attempt to counterpose 8212; everything was good then and it is bad today with this democracy and multiparty system. Here is an unexpected message: We had an ideology at the time so everything was good, but we don8217;t have any ideology today, which means that we cannot live well.8221;

On the Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal website, the last vestige of an independent media empire systematically dismantled by Putin early in his presidency, Anton Orekh wrote that Russians were mainly nostalgic for the illusion of stability that Brezhnev provided. 8220;People remember that wonderful feeling of not having to worry about anything because it was all decided for you and you had simply to live peacefully, go to work and pick up your wages,8221; he wrote. 8220;Give the people peace and quiet, immerse them in nirvana and they will celebrate your 100th birthday with pleasure.8221;

As long as they remain peaceful and quiet, the Russian people can live relatively unbothered by the state today. Those who try to influence their country in a significant way, however, risk harassment, prison or violence. The killing of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning in London has captured attention in the West, but he is only the latest person out of favour to fall into harm8217;s way.

In the last year alone, Marina Litvinovich, a former Kremlin adviser who had joined the small remaining political opposition, was attacked on the street. Marat Gelman, another ex-adviser to the Kremlin who helped create a faux opposition party to foster the illusion of political competition in 2003, was beaten and his art gallery torn apart. Anna Politkovskaya, the most prominent Russian journalist who earned an international reputation for her coverage of atrocities in Chechnya, was gunned down in her apartment on Putin8217;s birthday. Opposition leaders such as chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov have been targeted by raids or financial

investigation.

Nor was Litvinenko the first to be targeted outside of Russia. Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned and his face disfigured before he led the Orange Revolution and became president of that former Soviet republic two years ago. And Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed by a bomb attached to his car in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

Whether Putin orchestrated such incidents remains murky but they are a standard feature of the Russia he has built. Putin has even introduced a law permitting assassination of terrorists and enemies of the state abroad. With Putin facing a constitutional term-limit end to his presidency in 2008, the struggle for power is well under way and seems to be playing out in macabre and indecipherable ways.

Peter Baker is co-author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin8217;s Russia and the End of Revolution