The Former Former Russian Empire

President Bush's graceful longanimity towards the strongman Vladimir Putin can be attributed to the Texan's discreet public style but also to the limits of Western influence on the Kremlin's methodical constriction of Russia. Present methods continuing, Moscow becomes familiarly occluded and terse and monophonic; the democracies watch. If supremacy is Putin's end, Bush was right, in 2001, about the Russian's nationalistic determination. So, again, what about the eyes and soul? Permitted our own metaphysical fancy: Bush may have seen his own reflection in the glassy stare returned him, and decided that a redemption of the KGB's mechanical man, however resisted and therefore unlikely, could never be impossible. And he reminds Putin of that from time to time.

Still, Russia is doubling back to where Cold Warriors swore it would never return, and in the few days after Alexander Litvinenko's death somebody offered a sobering definition of Moscow's complicity. If Putin had Litvinenko murdered, then the gentlemanly dictatorship — the one which, by tradition, should be amenable to noblesse oblige — might be the first world actor to use a kind of a dirty bomb. The diplomatic idealists, still known as "realists," who are very interested in appeasement and may this January impel Washington to start making concessions, would need to explain how one form of authoritarianism was ultimately different from another, especially since each proceeds in roughly the same way — at least if someone put the hard question to them. A man who can sleep soundly after a day of bloodily insuring that his voice speaks loudest is incapable of beneficence but through intercessory conversion, and ambassadors can't arrange that. Threats are superficially different, fundamentally similar: Islamist fascism, Arabist fascism, Chinese fascism, Russian fascism, whatever.

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