Interesting. But I suspect if you add up freedom, opportunity, and standard of living, average Russians are doing better now than at any time in the county's history.
Russia always had a strong local-government democracy and with His Majesty’s political reform also had a parliament and a constitution.
I don't want to have to look all this up again, but I think the local government tradition goes back to the 1860s and the last tsar wasn't much of a fan of parliamentary government and constitutions. That's not the point I was trying to make, though.
But more importantly, Putin’s system inherits from the Soviet Union and not from the Russian Empire spiritually: it is a top-down system of one-party control and universal top-down criminality.
After 75 years of Communist dictatorship Russia didn't really have much else to build on or to start from. It's not surprising that today's Russia should be more marked by corruption and authoritarianism than other countries that were Communist for a shorter period.
Until recently it was more likely that Russian would relapse into some form of dictatorship than that it would move on to some freer, less corrupt form of representative democracy. I don't know how things are now. If dictatorship is still a real prospect maybe Putin is the least of evils. If Russian does have a good chance of moving beyond Putinism, possibly Putin deserves a little credit.
But my point wasn't to defend Putin. I was never that crazy about the guy, and I agree that he is marked by his participation in the tyrannical and corrupt Soviet regime.
What I would like to say is that our understanding of the world has been very shaped by the conditions of 1933-1945 or 1917-1991 -- that is to say, by mammoth battles between good and evil. I'd say that our situation now is more similar to how things were before 1914 -- a variety of competing regimes none of which is wholly good or wholly evil.
You could draw closer parallels between the tsarist regime itself or the German Empire of the Kaiser or the British or French Empires and states like Russia or China (or the US?) today than to those governments and 20th century totalitarianisms.
I understand very well that China is still officially Communist and that Putin's Russia is the heir to the Soviets, but the international scene is very different from what it was a half-century ago.
Better than in living memory, since the last man who actually remembered life in Russia died, like my Grandfather, in the 1980's. His memories were fond ones, and he was a barefooted factory apprentice in the Urals. He told me, simply, that all the talk about industrial tension, class struggle etc was pure bullsh-t.
However, by a proper historical standard -- comparing Russia of the first decade and a half of 20 c. to other European powers at that time, -- Russia looks far better then than it does today in the same comparison. Moreover, inlike West Europe, it was a country of rapid growth. If the rate of growth in pre-war Russia were to continue for another generation, rather than wrecked by the revolutions, it would have been a leading power in Europe by mid-century. This is an introductory text: Russia Botched Entire Century
The idea that Russia was a backwards country in need of some fixing is a bolshevik propaganda on one hand, and among the serious people it is an aftereffect of rapid growth diluted over a period starting too early (e.g. 1860) to capture the reality. In America, the notion of poor poorly governed Russia is a product of guilt over the support of the Communist regime and the natural for America aversion to monarchy.
the local government tradition goes back to the 1860s and the last tsar wasn't much of a fan of parliamentary government and constitutions.
That is all correct, however, the tradition of local government as such goes back to the Middle Age (Zemsky Sobor). The Romanovs were themselves a product of a popular election. That the Tsar dismissed the Duma was actually a good move and shows the preferability of monarchy to a democratic republic where such move would not be possible. What we had in Russia at the time as a productive cooperation of the democratic and monarchic principles. It was that functioning, living and breathing popular monarchism that was hated by the international left,-- precisely because it was successful economically, -- and ultimately they succeeded in destroying it in 1917.
I understand however, that it is not exactly the topic on hand. I just want to clarify my earlier statements, so that we both have a proper historiosophical background to Putin.
If dictatorship is still a real prospect maybe Putin is the least of evils.
Some form of dictatorship would be welcome. What Russia needs is a nationalist government focused on preserving and rebuilding specifically the Russian nation and culture, and what remains of the Russian economy. Any democratic system in Russia today will be immediately infected by the old boys of the dormant KGB apparatus, so an unpopular measure of lustrating the KGB ties would have to be taken for Russia to succeed in anything. The free enterprise system in Russia is corrupted by the same class, the Komsomol leaders of the 70's and 80's who are now at the peak of power and push their second generation of parasites forward.
The bottom line is that indeed Russian Federation is all-through socially conservative, whereas the West is torn between liberalism and tradition. However, in RF today the conservatism is not natural conservatism of a healthy nation, but a acid reflux from the conservatism of the Soviet era autocracy. It is not a genuine article. The same forces that today clamor for, for example, criminalization of mutually-consented homosexuality are the people who just as easily would ban all political dissent, free artistic expression, and generally will re-institute the USSR in all its aspects save, perhaps, doctrinaire marxism.
You could draw closer parallels between the tsarist regime itself or the German Empire of the Kaiser or the British or French Empires and states like Russia or China (or the US?) today than to those governments and 20th century totalitarianisms.
No, I think that the world of pre-1914 is gone forever. It is not even the same people: not the same Germans and not the same Russians. These two nations have been by and large destroyed. Well, the Germans may yet survive, but to say that RF today is somehow similar to historical Russia is grossly off the mark.