Strongman, The

expense. The recovery from the post-communist collapse had begun, they argued, not under Putin but earlier, in the final years of the Yeltsin presidency. Under Putin, instead of ‘authoritarian modernisation’ – which, had it worked, theoretically might have allowed one to forgive some of the anti-democratic tendencies of his rule – there was ‘authoritarianism without modernisation’. The brief period of progressive reforms had been replaced by ‘the greedy redistribution of property and the transformation of Russia into a police state’.
    Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine at exactly the same time, the American scholars Michael McFaul (later nominated by President Obama to become ambassador to Moscow) and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss came to similar conclusions. They wrote that although state resources had increased under Putin, allowing pensions and government salaries to be paid on time, and greater spending on roads and education, overall the state still performed poorly: ‘In terms of public safety, health, corruption, and the security of property rights, Russians are actually worse off today than they were a decade ago.’ 18 Security, ‘the most basic good a state can provide for its population’, had worsened: the frequency of terrorist attacks had increased under Putin; the number of military and civilian deaths in Chechnya was much higher than during the first war, and conflict in the North Caucasus region was spreading; the murder rate was rising; the death rate from fires was around 40 a day in Russia – roughly ten times the average rate in Western Europe. Health spending had gone down under Putin, the population was shrinking, alcohol consumption had soared and life expectancy had declined during the Putin years. ‘At the same time that Russian society has become less secure and less healthy under Putin,’ McFaul and Stoner-Weiss wrote, ‘Russia’s international rankings for economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption all have fallen.’ Corruption, in particular, had skyrocketed. Property rights had been undermined: not only had the state engineered the sell-off of Yukos assets to Rosneft, but the oil company Shell had been compelled to sell a majority share in Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom.
    Such was the state of the Russia that Dmitry Medvedev took over after his inauguration on 7 May 2008. There were signs that he shared, or at least understood, the kind of criticisms levelled at his predecessor’s record. The main sound-bite to emerge from his only election campaign speech was ‘Freedom is better than non-freedom’, and in his inauguration address he promised that ‘we must achieve a true respect for the law and overcome legal nihilism’.
    In foreign affairs, Medvedev wanted to make a quick impression. He rushed to Berlin (just as Putin had done) shortly after becoming president to make what he hoped would be a ground-breaking speech, in which he grandly called for a new European Security treaty. This, apparently (though it was not made clear), would replace all existing treaties and alliances, making NATO and the OSCE redundant and, of course, giving Russia its rightful place at the top table of a new organisation. The initiative was largely ignored, and not just because it was half-baked and raised more questions than it answered. It was ignored mainly because it was divorced from reality: Russia was still acting in ways that reminded most people of the USSR, it played gas wars with its neighbours, appeared to condone the murders of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, it bullied Georgia and Ukraine ... nobody wanted lectures about European security from a country like that. We in Ketchum sent memos explaining that foreign policy initiatives like this had to be part of a ‘package’, together with internal liberalisation, if they were be taken seriously. We pointed out why Mikhail Gorbachev had been so successful: he was a communist leader, but his arms-control gestures were taken seriously because he had also initiated glasnost and freed political prisoners. No one, we told the Kremlin, would take their security proposals seriously so long as they were rolling back democracy at home.
    Maybe – one liked to think – President Medvedev actually wanted to implement changes at home. But any hope of liberalisation was about to be dashed, as Russia for the first time since its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 went to war with one of its neighbours. The