Branko Milanovic makes an important distinction, one too often overlooked in the Russian field: that the introduction of democracy is not the same thing as the break-up of vast states, be they countries as he calls them or empires (as I would sometimes call them without any pejorative implication). Whatever their causal connections, they are different things. And of course should not be treated as the same thing.

The conflation of democratization with sympathy for separatism is frequently made by democracy-promoters. Even more often, democratization and federalism are equated with supporting ever greater decentralization, with no apparent stopping point short of separation.

Despite this, the official West has generally not conflated democracy with separatism. While it has often spoken in favor of decentralization, it has not intended this as separatism. In the case of Chechnya, the official West has always supported Russia's territorial integrity; that is why the Western media and NGOs are always attacking the Western governments as supporting Yeltsin and Putin in Chechnya. And the inter-governmental West, OECD, commented, in a major study on or piece of advice to Russia the 1990s, on the need to strengthen the Russian central government's capabilities and overcome the excessive economic autonomy of regions.

The problem is that Western media and private Western democracy-promoters (including some paid at arm's length by Western governments and easily mistaken for official spokespersons) have regularly conflated democratization with extreme decentralization of Russia and sometimes with support for separatism wherever it is to be found. Russians hear this conflation so many times from Western sources that they assume this is the official Western view. Actual Western policy is much more complex and sometimes exactly opposite to these publicists.

It seems from his comment that Branko Milanovic joins in confusing private Westerners with the official West on the question of confusing democracy with break-up. This doesn't however affect his argument; it only adds to the importance of his point that the distinction between democracy and break-up needs to be made - and by Westerners, not just by himself.

If he is mistaken in his East-West analysis -- that the West equates democracy with separatism, the East does not -- then it is a significant mistake. It matters that it gets perceived that way by some people in the East. As I see it, some people both in East and West conflate democracy with separatism, but often with opposite motives -- the Westerners in question do it to support separatism, the Easterners to support authoritarianism in the name of holding the country together. And the Easterners who make such a conflation, such as the late Mr. Milosevic and the present Mr. Putin, tend to be much more important than the Westerns.

Why then the perception that it is the other way around -- that it mainly Westerners who conflate the two? The only explanation I can see is that the conflation is propounded with enormous frequency by Western media, NGOs and democracy-promoters.

Easterners cannot be expected to grasp the difference between Western rhetoric and Western institutions. Western society and its institutions are a combination of evolved traditional and modern elements; its rhetoric tends to be post-modern. American rhetoric on government has generally been Jeffersonian, despite the greater role of Hamilton in building the American state. One might think from the Jeffersonian style of American rhetoric on federalism that it was Jefferson not Hamilton who organized The Federalist Papers and wrote most of them. Western discourse has become hyper-Jeffersonian since the 1960s; its "bigger and better" traditions and institutions became displaced on the intellectual and rhetorical level by "small is beautiful". This is the premise that leads to the habitual conflation of democracy with separatism.

The institutional prejudices that are urged upon the East in Western rhetoric are very different from the institutions that exist in the West, which have solid evolved normative foundations even if those foundations are neglected in contemporary rhetoric. Fortunately, there was a period of relative Hamiltonian predominance in American thinking about international affairs from about 1940 to 1960, during which West-West international institutions were built with some substance, the EU itself with a goal of federalism inspired by the Hamiltonian tradition; those Eastern countries that are able to make it into the Western international institutions proceed to get the benefit of this Hamiltonian reality, balancing the effects of the Jeffersonian rhetoric. Those countries that haven't got in -- and that includes the biggest one by far, Russia -- are left with the rhetoric as their main experience of the West. It is understandable in these circumstances that people will be prone to confuse the private West with the official West and believe that the official West, when it talks of promoting democracy, is promoting break-up.

That means the confusion is widespread on both ends, both East and West.

The prevalence of the confusion makes it a welcome thing for Mr. Milanovic to mention the distinction.

Most of the time, to be sure, democracy and break-up are only conflated, not explicitly equated. Probably it is usually subconscious, something that is taken for granted by the conflator.

The distinction between democracy and break-up is perhaps obvious, once stated. Nevertheless, this obvious distinction is one of those obvious things that is overlooked with great frequency.

Such confusions are inherently pernicious. And in this case it has done serious damage in the real world.

Perhaps some people assume there is an intimate positive causal connection between democracy and break-up, making their conflation something of an innocent abbreviation. They should consider how often the causal relation is actually negative rather than positive -- how often democracy and break-up are opposites. For example, the separation of Central Asia from the Russian state brought regression to a mix of pre-Gorbachev style authoritarianism with Oriental-style despotism.

Further: The cause of democracy in Russia (and Serbia) has been hurt tremendously by the conflation of democracy with separatism. The West and the Democrats in Russia (and Serbia) have been deeply discredited by the belief that they are the cause of the break-up of the Russian empire (and of Yugoslavia).

Today there is an ongoing symbiotic relation between those on the Western side who conflate democracy with break-up in order to support separatism, and those on the Russian (and Serb) side who do so to justify authoritarianism.

Putin justifies his authoritarianism as necessary to hold Russia together, or as necessary for recentralization. Westerners in the media and elsewhere, by equating recentralization with authoritarianism, and by conflating democracy with break-up, give his view tremendous support. They legitimize Putin's authoritarianism.

Please note how serious this is. Large sectors of Western democracy-promoters and media actually preach things that legitimize Putin's authoritarianism -- not in the way Putin says, by supporting Orange Revolutions and engendering Russian reactions to that, but in a much more intimate and direct way, by reinforcing his prejudice that recentralization and authoritarianism are the same thing. They form a symbiotic alliance with Putin on this point. They help to convince Russians that Putinian authoritarianism is the only alternative to further decentralization and disintegration. After all, if further decentralization is what even the Westerners seem to be saying that democracy means for Russia, how can ordinary Russians be expected to dispute this conclusion?

Discourse becomes a hall of mirrors. Radical simplifiers and mystifiers on both sides -- Russian authoritarians, Western proponents of break-up -- feed off of a debate with each other in which they both talk past one another but both actually agree on the main point (or main unexamined prejudice). Sensible moderate people -- democrats who support Russia's unity -- get marginalized.

A shining example of the Hall of Mirrors, with mutual reflection between Western and Russian break-up advocates, was seen on JRL 246 just a few days ago, in the column of Paul Goble, "Window on Eurasia: Russian Nationalists, Russian Patriots Square Off".

Goble is one of the only two prominent Americans who sometimes advocate a break-up of Russia; the other is Brzezinski. His column highlights a supposedly good Russian nationalist, Aleksei Shiropayev, who "argues that Russian nationalism properly understood will promote democracy, capitalism, and integration with Europe" by the marvelous means of despising the central state, on whose altar the narod has always been sacrificed, and creating a bunch of "regional governments that are closer to the people", and that might or might not become fully independent, but which could in any case somehow "join Europe". Probably 99% of Russian nationalists would recognize Shiropayev's nationalism as fake, a rhetorical use of the word to undermine the actual Russian nation. When Goble highlights it as the true Russian nationalism, it is fair to say that he writes as a false mirror of Russian nationalism; just as Shiropayev has written falsely as a mirror of the West when he propagates the illusion that Europe would welcome a broken-up Russia more easily than a whole Russia. So it goes in the Hall of Mirrors.

Few are the Russian Democrats who add more mirrors to the Hall, by themselves supporting break-up and saying that it is what the West wants from their country. But the effect of the hall of mirrors is to amplify their role tremendously, making them seem like very important Western Agents.

When Russians hear from both ends -- authoritarians and democrats, in their own country and in the West as well -- that their choice is authoritarianism or break-up, it is hardly surprising that a large majority of them choose authoritarianism. Polls have shown Russians endorsing Putin's authoritarianism on the specific ground that it is holding the country together.

The space for normal Russian Democrats, who do not want or accept break-up, is reduced to a fraction of what it otherwise could be. Which probably has something to do with why they get so few votes.

The current misperception gets read back into the history of 1990-91, when many Russian Democrats really did accept and participate in the break-up of the Soviet Union. The current myth is that this was done for the sake of the West, or in some versions (including quasi-official Russian military and security apparatus versions), under the guidance of Western intelligence services.

All kinds of elementary realities are forgotten in this myth -- that the break-up was internally generated with virtually no Western role; that the position of Russian Democrats, while debatable, had real justification in that it avoided the sort of devastating core civil wars that afflicted Yugoslavia, which might well have been the alternative in face of the cumulative failings of the Moscow center's policies from 1987 to 1991 in dealing with the national question; that official Western support was limited to the independence of the Baltic states and was based there on a long tradition of rejecting the Nazi-Soviet pact, not on enmity to the unity of the rest of the Russian empire; that President Bush I spoke at the time in Kiev against "suicidal nationalism"; that Yeltsin began the "recentralization" of Russia or recovery of a functioning central government from the start in 1992, did an impressive job of patching Russia back together, a result that was far from inevitable, and laid the basis for Putin's continued recentralization. In the new mega-myth, Western democracy-promotion throughout the Cold War was aimed at the break-up of the Soviet Union, and since then at the break-up of Russia; the Russian "Democrats" were agents of the Western embassies in this dirty work; the Yeltsin regime was decentralizing and disintegrating Russia all the time until Putin came in to save it; and Russians should forever love Putin and hate the Democrats for this.

How much more damage will come out of this myth? It remains to be seen. Putin's wielding of it to demagogic effect against the Democrats in recent days, calling them agents of a West that is working for Russia's break-up, is an indicator of how far it could go. It was easily enough predicted in the early 1990s that the stab-in-the-back myth would become a core element of a Russian nationalist revenge movement; the Communists and ultra-nationalists were already using it that way. What was not predicted -- except perhaps by Alexander Yanov, in the capacity of stating what was his worst nightmare -- was that the head of state would be using it in the first decade of the 21st century, and making it pretty central to his ideological position.

So I would like to thank Branco Milanovic again for doing his part to shatter the Hall of Mirrors, by the simple act of interposing his body in the middle of it and pointing out that its central proposition is a plainly false.

We Westerners ought to be able to respond by doing likewise. That would at least show that good people on both ends, East and West, can reflect truth and common sense back to one another on this question.

If done by enough people, it might finally create a set of mirrors or mutual support in talking good sense and elementary good will. And that might someday - who knows? - prove more powerful than the symbiotic hall of mirrors. After all, the latter suffers an irreparable fragility: its partisans on the two ends have opposite motives, and part-malicious ones at that, and a simple confusion at the core of their argument. Sensible discourse on both sides can provide mutual support in a direct way, synthetic not symbiotic, without any absurdity at the core.