THE PROBLEM WITH PRETENDING THAT THE ISMs ARE A SERIOUS THREAT:

In 1997, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration's lead official on all matters Russia, gave a speech at Stanford University on American policy toward Moscow. He admitted, in not so many words, that persuading the erratic President Boris Yeltsin to keep on course with economic reform and progress toward democracy was a daunting task. But Talbott declared himself optimistic nonetheless. His main reason, he said, was "generational,"

or to be even more blunt, biological. The dynamic of what is happening in Russia today is not just Westernizers versus Slavophiles; it is also young versus old--and the young have a certain advantage in at least that dimension of the larger struggle.

I was a correspondent in Moscow at the time I read Talbott's speech, and I remember being struck by its obtuseness--a feeling that has remained with me since. I wondered how younger Russians would react to a U.S. diplomat openly expressing the hope that their grandparents and parents would die off as quickly as possible and so open the path to an American vision of progress.

There was nothing especially original about my question. Communists and ultranationalists were already trading widely in conspiracy theories that the country's startling demographic collapse, unprecedented in peacetime, was the direct result of American-engineered plots "to weaken Russia." In reality, of course, a "weakened Russia" was much more likely to lose effective control over its vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, drastically increasing the possibility that some might fall into terrorist hands. Such an outcome hardly seemed to be in the interests of the West or anyone else. A stable Russia, prosperous and democratic, made for a much better bet--assuming, of course, that someone had a viable plan for bringing it about.

By the time of Talbott's speech, such a scenario was looking distinctly improbable. During my years in Moscow, I did meet quite a few Russians who placed their faith in the principles of political and economic freedom, though they were clearly members of a small minority. Strikingly little evidence, however, supported the notion that young people were the self-evident constituency for a liberal future. Most of the 20-somethings I met--and especially those from outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg--expressed strongly nationalist views. Though they welcomed the freedom to travel and consume, they just as often mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those with little memory of the privations of the socialist system, and who had experienced the Gorbachev and Yeltsin period primarily as a time of political chaos and economic upheaval, such seemingly paradoxical positions made perfect sense. [...]

The government of Boris Yeltsin, while genuinely progressive in some ways, was hamstrung from its beginning by a failure to solve the lingering economic catastrophe it inherited from Soviet times. Aware of his ebbing popularity, Yeltsin ultimately eschewed putting the Soviet Communist Party on trial; efforts to engage in a meaningful truth and reconciliation program, which might have helped to make Russians more aware of the grim realities of the past, were deferred. As Gorbachev's attempt to create a more humane (but still Communist) Soviet Union foundered on the two-pronged resistance of conservatives and Yeltsinite liberals, Alexander Yakovlev, Seryozha's grandfather, was appointed chair of a Rehabilitation Commission, devoted to documenting the horrors of the Stalinist era and helping its victims. But by 1991 the Commission lost its funding and, over time, it became clear that Yeltsin no longer intended to expend the political capital needed to reckon with a painful history.

The economic disruptions of the 1990s harmed the prospect of democracy in a second important way. Between the hyperinflation of 1991 to '93 (which destroyed the savings of many citizens, especially the elderly) and the devaluation and financial crisis of 1998 (which devastated the green shoots of the nascent market economy), many ordinary Russians began to identify "democracy" with impoverishment and rank injustice. The irony, as Gessen shows, is that this "democracy" was never especially liberal to begin with--certainly not after 1993, when Yeltsin was forced to turn tanks and artillery on conservative rebels in the same Russian parliament building where he had defied the coup attempt of 1991.

After Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, he moved slowly and methodically to consolidate his position, gradually stripping rival oligarchs of their media properties and their political power. He placed his allies--his longtime friends from St. Petersburg as well as his associates from the Soviet-era secret police--in crucial spots in the bureaucracy, where they often wielded huge sway over large sections of the economy. Aside from a few vague allusions to Soviet and Russian greatness, Putin made little reference to ideology along the way.

It was Alexander Dugin, a once-marginal nerd, who provided the necessary intellectual underpinning for this old-new system. Spurred on by his study of Heidegger and European identitarians, Dugin rediscovered and celebrated the radically anti-Western strain in Russian intellectual history. He embraced the "ethnogenetic" theories of Lev Gumilev, the former dissident who viewed Russia as a sort of mystical hybrid of the most powerful cultural traits of Europe and Asia. Dugin celebrated the presumed superiority of what he began to call the "Russian World" (a phrase now widely used by the Putin regime) and bitterly denounced the United States and other western democracies for their diabolical plans to impose their allegedly "alien" values on a "traditional values civilization."

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