Time was, a whole cottage industry developed around the tantalizing issue of “Who is Mr. Putin?” Nowadays it has been supplanted by just as maddening a theme on which the pundits exercise their nimble minds, namely, the Putin/Medvedev relationship. Is it a tandemocracy, a tandemonarchy, or ­ what is it? And what’s in it for us?

Frankly, I stopped reading “analyses” of the Putin-Medvedev relationship a while ago ­ a paragraph or two usually suffices. This kind of literature mostly stems from observation of TV sequences, photo ops, and from the authors’ own prejudices, in the hallowed tradition of Kremlinologists who used to use calipers to measure distances between various characters on the Lenin Mausoleum rostrum during military parades and to build their “politological” schemata on that basis. This pursuit would be quite innocuous if it did not supersede the really important issues, of which, to me, there are plenty.

Like, how come that the number of Russian billionaires and millionaires keeps doubling while the numbers of the desperately poor are falling but oh so slowly? How come that in Russia, a top oil producer, gasoline costs in places as much as in New York, while average Russian wages and pensions are a fraction of the American ones? How come that Russia, which possesses half the world’s black-earth soil, imports foodstuffs from Europe, the States, and ­ believe it or not ­ from Poland? How come that Finance Minister Kudrin invests billions of Russia’s petrodollars in U.S. companies that are way in the red and are losing those billions that by rights belong to Russia’s public?

There is about a zillion of such interesting questions ­ and what the “pundits” seem to be mostly interested in is whether Medvedev is more “liberal” than Putin which, with verbal husks peeled off, means simply this: Will he or will he not revert to the pre-Putin “strategy” of kowtowing to the U.S., and the West in general, on every conceivable issue.

The clear and concise answer to this is, He will not. A somewhat lengthier answer is, He will not be allowed to, even if he were so minded ­ which he is not. Putin and his close environment, Medvedev included, have built up a machine that cannot be dismantled at the whim of some Gorbachev-like general secretary or Yeltsin-like peasant czar. There is no general secretary, the times of the peasant czar are definitely over, the country is different, and the machine I mentioned is taking this country along a path that is not much, say, to my own liking ­ but at least it is a guarantee of Russia surviving as an integral entity. And this, as the life experience of my own generation has shown, should be an overriding concern for every decent citizen of Russia, as well as a state of things that cannot be taken for granted. Too many people took the existence of the Soviet Union ­ an historical Russia under a different name ­ for granted, and now we have what we have.

I personally cannot view the present situation without a considerable degree of bitterness, even rancor. Consider Georgia and Ukraine. My own forefathers, Russian servicemen, were settled in Georgia for about two centuries, since 1780, saving Georgians from annihilation and assimilation by that country’s Islamic environment, at the express plea from Georgian Czar Irakly. Accordingly, I have a few great-grandmothers of pure Georgian descent, and used to go to Georgia, to a place some 70 kilometers from Tbilisi, to attend to their graves until 1990 but no longer, with the “Georgia for Georgians” slogan prevailing these days. Unaccountably, this slogan is complemented by the tacit “Russia for Georgians, too” assumption, with about a million (some say more, some say less) finding jobs in Russia as the only way to support their families back in Georgia, with its basket-case economy. No wonder some black humorists here have come up with the slogan Rossiya i dlya russkikh tozhe “Russia is for Russians, too” (meaning, not just for the non-Russians).

Or consider Ukraine. My own Uncle Peter died in the battle of Kiev in 1941, and now President Yushchenko is awarding medals to faithful servants of the Nazis only because they were also anti-Soviet, for which read anti-Russian. Someone should certainly reread the Nuremberg trial materials, which state in no uncertain terms that the Nazis were criminals, they have been treated accordingly ­ and must still be treated in the same way. Instead, Ukrainian Russia-haters rewrite history ­ and literature, too: Gogol is being translated into Ukrainian, with the word “Ukrainian” shamelessly substituted for Gogol’s “Russian.”

Much like in the case of Georgia, this goes hand in hand with brazen insistence on Russia continuing to subsidize Ukraine to the tune of five billion dollars a year, through special gas prices. Actually, the Ukrainian “elite” goes a step further, stating privately but unequivocally: Vorovali, voruyem i budem vorovat’, meaning they used to steal gas from the pipelines passing through Ukraine, they still steal gas, and they fully intend to go on stealing it. How else could current Premier Yulia Timoshenko, the Gas Princess, have “earned” her billions ­ from Ukrainian gas fields? There aren’t any.

The U.S. justice system seems a bit on the selective side here: it slammed Timoshenko’s immediate superior, ex-premier Lazarenko, in the clink, while Timoshenko, guilty of exactly the same crimes as Lazarenko but very instrumental in the process of drawing Ukraine into NATO, is held up as a beacon of Orange freedom and democracy, of which the benefits should be extended to Russia, according to those same “pundits.” Is it surprising that the Russian public is overwhelmingly inclined to view the prospect of some sort of “color revolution” here with little humor? Like a certain royal personage used to say, We are not amused. We have seen enough thieves of our own in and around the Kremlin.

Sure, I get a bit hot under the collar whenever I start on these sort of subjects ­ the discrepancy between what one reads in the pundits’ analyses and what one sees with one’s own naked eyes is too much to stomach. Right where I sit in my study on the second floor of my dacha, I can see a hut that a chap from Ukraine has built for himself and other guys who do odd jobs around the local dachas, my own included. There is a lot of construction going on here, other dachas springing up all around us on empty lots. He has been coming here every summer for 13 years, he says, and has been earning enough for his family to lead a comfortable existence back in Odessa all the year round. He has even bought himself a big van ­ something that I could never afford. And it is an open secret that he has never paid a red cent in Russian or any other taxes. More than that, as he knows his way around here, he exploits other illegal migrants, mostly Tajiks and Moldavians (he himself is Russian).

This is how life in the raw is lived around here, and you can be sure that this guy Victor would be definitely against Ukraine’s accession to NATO ­ if he ever bothered his head about such abstruse things. I am afraid he will have to, sooner or later ­ when all of a sudden he discovers that he requires a visa to drive his van along a route that he used to drive along without noticing the borders much. Because to him it was still one country.

So these are the things that folks get emotional about, down here on the ground. And when they hear of all the fuss about the Putin/Medvedev relationship, their response is a perplexed stare: Moujik, nam by tvoi zaboty. “Listen, man, I wish I had your problems…”