4/25/2005 08:04:00 PM|||Nathan Moore|||

If there was any doubt as to the designs of the current Russian president, his state of the nation speech eliminates it. The revival of the Soviet empire is no longer an implied goal, as keen Russia watchers have long been convinced, but is now a stated lament. Only a KGB colonel could, with a straight-face, describe the dissolution of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century", and then speak moments later about the Russian commitment to freedom and private property. An American academic could not have said it better. The key difference, of course, being that the average American academic doesn't possess the world's second largest nuclear arsenal.

The elections of 2008 in Russia will be most interesting. Russian politics have been known off and on for spectacular unpredictability. Putin's ascension, for those who may recall, came on the heels of midnight Y2K resignation of Boris Yeltsin, an amicable drunk, who with periods of sober lucidity revealed keen political instincts. Gorbachev. for all his international celebra, oversaw the implosion that Putin so tearfully recalls. By Putin's own standard, granting that the Soviet collapse as a "geopolitical catastrophe", Gorbachev would be the James Buchanan of Soviet premiers. This in and of itself is an interesting assessment. I don't think that particular assessment will creep into the revisionist hagiographies of Gorbachev's role in ending the Cold War, but it at least puts into perspective the Russian world view now. And puts us on notice as to what irks the leadership - not that capitalism and democracy aren't advancing fast enough, but that the force that held them at bay no longer exists.

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