Jacob Heilbrunn: In Defense of Vladimir Putin

Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of the newly released, They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons, and a senior editor at the National Interest.  

President Vladimir Putin has come in for something of a pummeling with his announcement that he attends to run, or rule, Russia by trading jobs with his sidekick Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. To put in an American context, Medvedev roughly plays Bucky to Putin's Captain America. The arrangement seems to suit many Russians just fine. Yet Putin has always been unpopular in the West. He's seen as a ruthless monster, a former KGB agent who is the prime culprit in Moscow's turn away from democracy towards traditional authoritarian rule. "Putinism," the Times of London recently announced, "is Stalinism."

But is he really that bad? What's the alternative to him? Might not Putin turn out to be a closet democrat who revives his country over the next decade?

No one is under the illusion that Putin is a very nice man or that he isn't in charge of a pretty nasty regime. But writing in the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell makes what amounts to the case for Putin and Putinism. He notes that democracies always come under suspicion when times are rough. And 1990s Russia was a rough place. The oligarchs were running rampant. The West was repeatedly humiliating Moscow, treating Boris Yeltsin like an errand boy. The West cannot escape its culpability for helping pave the way for a Putin to come to power...