Meanwhile, politics belongs to the elite. If Russia is to move forward, its high and mighty must agree about who owns what, who makes the rules and how to change the rules. Rather than calling for democracy, this calls for a genuine constitutional rule of law. In other words, the task is to turn tsarist Russia into a version of the Kaiser's Germany.
This won't be easy, but there are good reasons for optimism. With so much being written about Putin's Russia, the rest of the country is often overlooked. Putin's Russia is essentially about the Kremlin and the bureaucracy. They are dominant, no doubt, but they are not Russia in its entirety.
The millions of consumers exercising their right to choose in the rapidly growing supermarket chains; the planeloads of business travelers converging on London, Zurich and Frankfurt daily; the holiday-makers who, having lost the Crimea, have rediscovered the Mediterranean -- all are part of a Russia beyond Putin's Russia, one that will grow and develop even when Putin is history.
So Russia's current agenda must be more about freedom than democracy. Even now, Russia, though undemocratic, is largely free. What it needs is to institutionalize that freedom by building a modern state to replace the antiquated tsarist system. It also needs a modern civil society to consolidate its multi-ethnic post-imperial population.
This calls for a kind of liberalism that is now lacking in Russia, one that stands for freedom, reform, and the nation-state. Neither the government nor the current opposition possesses it, which means that Russians must look beyond Putin's Russia.
As for the West, it is fruitless to try to bring Putin and his team back to democracy, where Russia does not belong, or to punish Russia with sanctions, which won't work. The West must recognize where Russia stands on history's timeline and not seek to wish this away. The political gap can be narrowed only by indigenous capitalist development. In the meantime, the US and Europe should base their policies toward Russia on mutual interests, not the expectation of mutual values.
Dmitri Trenin is Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Director of Studies at its Moscow Center. Copyright: Project Syndicate
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