Time Magazine has named Russian President Vladimir Putin their Person of the Year for 2007:
Russia lives in history—and history lives in Russia. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union cast an ominous shadow over the world. It was the U.S.’s dark twin. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia receded from the American consciousness as we became mired in our own polarized politics. And it lost its place in the great game of geopolitics, its significance dwarfed not just by the U.S. but also by the rising giants of China and India. That view was always naive. Russia is central to our world—and the new world that is being born. It is the largest country on earth; it shares a 2,600-mile (4,200 km) border with China; it has a significant and restive Islamic population; it has the world’s largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and a lethal nuclear arsenal; it is the world’s second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; and it is an indispensable player in whatever happens in the Middle East. For all these reasons, if Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
The question, of course, is how you define success. Putin’s Presidency has, at Time, notes witnessed an economic revival of sorts in Russia, although a good part of that is due to the fact that oil prices have skyrocketed in recent years and Russia has some of the largest oil reserves outside of OPEC. At the same time, though, Putin’s accomplishments have come with a price that indicates just what vision he has for the future of Russia:
To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin’s hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain—of freedom for security—appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes’ promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin’s popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. “He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great,” says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.
Rather than being counted as a success of Russian democracy, Putin’s rise and the gradual withering away of any promise that liberty in any true sense of the word will come to Russia any time soon should be seen and recognized for the failure that they are. Putin may have turned the Russian economy around and returned a sense of pride to Russia, but don’t forget; Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler restored German pride after World War I.
It doesn’t always matter what you accomplish. What matters is how you do it. So far at least, it’s fairly clear that Vladimir Putin has set Russia back down the road to dictatorship.
