New Russians

The idea of "managed democracy," as Kremlin ideologists call it, is now open to question. Although there have been repeated attempts to blame the crisis on the United States -- to hear it from state-controlled television, you'd think the Lehman Brothers collapse single-handedly derailed the Russian economy -- there is a new understanding that Russia is now very much woven into the international, commercial fabric (the Kremlin's withdrawal from World Trade Organization talks notwithstanding).

"Russia cannot afford anymore to have bad relations with the United States in the middle of a financial crisis," Nikolai Zlobin of the Washington-based World Security Institute told me. "The Russian situation is not as good as the government expected. Russia is going to have a hard time in the next year or two." And there have been renewed calls, particularly by the oligarchs, for Russia to diversify its economy away from oil and gas. This diversification can only be achieved, as Medvedev has noted, by enforcing the rule of law and protecting private property.

But it is the quest to revamp the military -- led by Medvedev, chair of Russia's Security Council -- into a highly mobile, Donald Rumsfeld-style, fighting force that focuses less on massive tank battles in Western Europe and more on Islamic fundamentalists in the Caucasus, arms traffickers on the Silk Road, and pirates off the Somali coast that is likely to have the longer-term impact. Economic figures wax and wane. The strategic goals of a country, reflected in its military planning, show how that country imagines itself vis-à-vis the rest of the world. This is particularly true in Russia, where military culture and the Great Patriotic War, i.e., World War II, remain at the center of the national discourse, on television, in newspapers, in movies, and in the way Russians talk about Russia.

Reforming the military, says Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, "is founded on the idea that there is not going to be a wide-scale war with the United States or China. That could be a major change. It's not just the armed forces. It's the entire country that, until today, has lived under the assumption that there's going to be a major war just like the Second World War."

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