At the risk of taking issue with a far older and more established (or simply…established) Russia commentator, I did have some disagreements with Anders Aslund’s eloquent denunciation of the Putin regime.

First of all, let me agree heartily with one point Aslund makes – prime minister Mikhail Fradkov doesn’t seem up to the job, and the government seemed to function better with the Kasyanov-Voloshin duo in action. President Putin does seem something of a control freak, though he is hardly the first Russian leader to worry that if he doesn’t do something himself, it won’t get done. If he hadn’t personally intervened in the mini-submarine disaster, would the sailors still be alive?

Now to the points with which I disagree. Aslund’s main thesis is that Russia under Putin’s second term has lurched towards authoritarianism. “Russia’s regime has gone through a major aggravation during the first year of President Vladimir Putin’s second term”, as the thesis summarizes.

I went to a recent seminar on democracy at Aslund’s excellent Carnegie Center in Moscow, and the Russian pundits at the seminar, including professor Yevgeny Yassin, reached a consensus that if Russia had taken a lurch back to authoritarianism after the collapse of the USSR, it happened about two years into Yeltsin’s reign.

Aslund says “the Russian regime has changed profoundly under President Putin”. This is being too generous too Yeltsin and too harsh to Putin, something western commentators tend to be.

It was an authoritarian, semi-democratic and occasionally imperialist regime in the 1990s, and that is what it remains.

You could argue that Yeltsin’s regime was in some ways more ‘liberal’, but only if you defined liberal as pro-oligarch. Not pro-private property, not pro-civil rights, not pro-free elections. Simply pro-oligarch.

Which brings us to the question of to whether Aslund really means ‘anti-oligarch’ when he says Putin is ‘anti-democratic’. In some ways, it sums up all that is wrong about Aslund’s thinking that the first piece of evidence he gives for the fact that Russia is heading for disaster is an insight from a “very wealthy Russian”, ie one of the elite handful of ex-oligarchs, as we all are obviously meant to infer.

If I am looking for a reliable guide to the health of Russia, I would not necessarily turn to an oligarch. If I wanted to find a good masseuse, or a decent tailor, maybe. But not an impartial view of the state of the nation.

Aslund says his wealthy friend’s insights show a “lack of belief even among the rich and mighty”. It’s not even among the rich and mighty. It’s only among the rich and mighty, and the liberal think-tanks who, is it vulgar of us to mention, rely on said rich and mighty for their funding, as much as for their ‘word on the street’ insights.

And yet the fact that Putin no longer listens to the ten or so oligarchs as much as he does to members of his own government is taken, by Aslund, as evidence that “Putin can no longer claim to represent the population at large”. Aslund seems to have an extremely narrow definition of the population at large. And why shouldn’t Putin listen to members of his own government, KGB or otherwise, before oligarchs? It was the 1990s-era, when a handful of unelected and criminal racketeers ran Russia, that was the aberration. Now, an elected government holds power, and doesn’t bow and crawl to the gangsters. I know Aslund’s foundation was set up by a robber baron, but Aslund seems to have entirely too misty-eyed a view of the Russian equivalent.

He defends the oligarchs by saying they played an important role as a check and balance to the KGB contingent. But when were the oligarchs ever defenders of civil or property rights? They employed half the KGB in their own private security services. And their exit from political power has not left the Kremlin without a check on its power – it still has the international community, which Putin has moved to join, via his signing of the Kyoto protocol, his joining of the WTO, his government’s active work with the IAEA, and with the US on non-proliferation, his liberalization of Gazprom shares, the TNK-BP merger, the LUKoil- Conoco merger, the spate of London IPOs which have occurred under his reign (especially in the second term) etc etc etc. Putin’s Russia is a more predictable and responsible international player than Yeltsin’s Russia.

Going back to Khodorkovsky, Aslund criticizes Putin for suggesting the amount of money Khodorkovsky spent on PR might have something to do with western media criticism of the Yukos affair. Putin made a completely fair point. Everyone, from Henry Kissinger to Magdalen College, received Yukos grants or salaries. Hell, I was a Yukos young leader myself. And wouldn’t it have been scrupulous to mention that the Carnegie, also, received Yukos grants?

A fairer criticism to make would be that Putin’s government should have spent an equal amount on PR – it completely failed to put forward its anti-Khodorkovsky case to the western press, leaving the field to the far more media-savvy Misha and his gang of western advisors. But that’s a failure of spin, not policy.

Aslund says every Russian leader since Stalin has invoked the threat of hardliners, only to say in the next paragraph that Putin faces a threat from…KGB hardliners. And he probably over-stresses the KGB weighting in the government. Medvedev, Surkov, Gref, Kudrin, Zhukov, Kozak, Lavrov – some of the most active members of Putin’s government – are not to my knowledge KGB. Besides, if former membership of a Cold War-era secret service disqualifies one from serious political opinion, then shouldn’t we discount the anti-Putin view of Freedom House, run by that old Washington Silovik, James Woolsley?

He criticizes Putin for his involvement in the Ukraine election. I cheered as loud as anyone when Yushchenko won. However, it’s unfair to Putin to say his support of Yanukovich was “poorly informed”. He supported the pro-Russia candidate, because he wanted to protect Russia’s gas pipelines to the west, on which most of Gazprom’s profit relies, as well as the Russian fleet in Sevastopol. These are legitimate interests, even if we suspect the Kremlin helped use illegitimate means to defend them.

The Kremlin also claims the democratic revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were all the work of covert US neo-cons. This is unfair to the indigenous democratic movements in at least the first three of these countries. But to read Aslund’s unfortunate suggestion that the US should simply create and manipulate youth movements like OTPOR to help topple Putin, it would seem the Kremlin’s counter-revolutionary paranoia was well-founded.

Aslund criticizes Putin for liberal benefit reform, ie from the Left, and also for nationalizing Yukos, ie from the Right. He seems content to throw anything he can find against Putin, regardless of ideological incoherence.

And finally, it is extremely unfair to suggest Putin somehow didn’t care about Beslan, and that he can be held entirely responsible for what occurred. It was a terrible tragedy, and a brutal one. It could certainly be said to stem from a failure of Putin’s Caucasus policy. But let’s not forget that, first, Basayev’s terrorism continued even when Chechnya was autonomous, and secondly, surely some of the blame for that dreadful day should go to the terrorists who seized that building on the first day of school, wired it up with bombs, and killed some of the children before the school was stormed. Surely we put some of the blame on them.

Finally, Aslund suggests Putin’s regime is so unstable that it won’t make it to 2008. I don’t think Aslund would find one resident of Moscow, with the possible exceptions of Garry Kasparov and Eduard Limonov, who would put money on the idea that Putin would be overthrown by a revolution or KGB coup before 2008. It’s just a fantastic idea. Aslund suggests that Putin has become out of touch with reality, communicating only with a coterie of anti-Western Siloviki, but I would suggest it is Aslund himself, communicating only with other anti-Russian Siloviki in Washington, like Woolsley and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has himself become out of touch.