To Russia, with scepticism

Last and not least: while there were dissidents in the Soviet Union, the transformation initiated by Gorbachev was ultimately a bureaucratic reform from above: there was no Russian Solidarnoœæ, no Carta-77, no Magyar Democratic Forum - nor did there appear a Russian Lech Wa³êca or Vaclav Havel.

It was into this vacuum that Putin - and the whole military-cum-security-services bureaucracy - moved. The catch-word of "saving Russia" was not a hollow claim. But the system which they consolidated - “authoritarianism with human face”, if one may be allowed that simile - may help keep Russia together and emancipate its economy from the robber barons: but it will not create a liberal, democratic country, nor will it give rise to a market economy.

The system's hallmarks: a mild authoritarian system - more manipulative than oppressive - coupled with a state-controlled, though not necessarily state-owned, economy seem to be the only feasible alternatives to the chaos, corruption and disintegration which characterised the 1990s in Russia.

On the international arena, we have witnessed in the last few years a reassertion of Russian power: critical towards the United States on Iraq, often playing the European Union against the US, unwilling to go along with the US and EU on Iran, reaching rapprochement with China and attempting to regain some influence in the Middle East.

These moves, coming after almost a decade of pliant and self-effacing foreign policy, have sometimes given rise to the notion that under Putin, Russia is trying to re-build the role the Soviet Union held during the Cold War: "Is the Cold War Coming Back?"

This is the wrong-heading. The Soviet Union is dead, and so is Soviet foreign policy, and neither can be resuscitated. But Russia as a major player is back - yet the two are fundamentally different.

The Soviet Union was a unique phenomenon in international relations. It was on one hand a super power, endowed with the usual characteristics that go with that status: extensive territorial expanse, preponderant military power, a nuclear arsenal and a ring of client states. Yet beyond this, it was also a bearer of a revolutionary and transformative ideology which provided it with agents and supporters in virtually every continent and almost every country in the world.

Communist and other revolutionary movements, especially in developing countries, looked to Moscow as their model and supporter, and Moscow viewed them as allies. This combination of a Great Power and a revolutionary ideology has not been seen on the international scene since the French Revolution: but then it was short-lived and soon to disappear, and in any case was basically a European, and not a global phenomenon.

In the case of the Soviet Union, in Africa and Latin America, in South-East Asia and the Middle East (even in Western Europe, but less so), the Soviet Union had internal ideological allies, sometimes involved in guerilla warfare, sometimes in all-out wars. It was this which then motivated the Cold War ideology and made the slogan of "defending democracy" such a powerful vehicle in the West. The Cold War was not only a strategic struggle but also a war of ideas.

Nothing of the sort comes out of Russia now. Putin has succeeded in projecting an independent and robust foreign policy, currently also underpinned by the role of Russia as a major energy supplier.

But this newly re-asserted Russian stance is pure old-fashioned power politics. There are no dreamers in South American or African jungles hoping to establish a New Jerusalem, modelled on Moscow, in their own societies; there are no Arab or Turkish intellectuals hoping to establish in their countries a Putinesque regime, nor are there oppressed peasants anywhere trying to establish a local utopia based on the way Russia handles its social problems.

For all the critique one occasionally hears in the West of Russian brutality in Chechnya, no one is arguing that this jeopardises the purity of its ideological credentials or diminishes the belief of anyone anywhere in the justice and redemptive power of the Russian political system.