The bookstores this Christmas are crammed with shocked, maiden-auntish books about the wickedness of Vladimir Putin, written in tones of horror and surprise. I must ask all these authors “What took you so long?” I recently turned up my archives from March 2004, in which I wrote during a visit to Moscow, “Like a column of tanks in human form, Vladimir Putin slowly crushes the freedoms that flourished in Russia after the sudden collapse of the old communist order—and nobody cares … what is worse is that this assault on liberty is actually popular at home and willingly excused abroad.”
As I noted then, the rest of the world, having put up with the drunken, loutish incompetence of Boris Yeltsin, wasn’t really bothered at all about the internal state of Russia, which was weak, olympically corrupt, and economically and politically laughable. It fought an appalling, barbaric war in Chechnya. When Yeltsin rigged his own re-election and sent tanks to shell his parliament, the West shrugged and even giggled. It has since pretended to be deeply concerned about internal repression in Russia, not because it cares much about actual Russians, but because Russia under Putin has become a foreign-policy problem. What an interesting paradox this hypocrisy might have created. Had post-Yeltsin Russia developed into a law-governed democracy, as we all claimed we wanted it to, it might also have turned out to be even more hostile to Western diplomacy in Europe than it is now. And then what?