Yes, but it won’t last. Reasonable people can agree that Russia’s postcommunist evolution is a textbook case of what not to do. Nearly two decades after the fall of communism, Russia is not a democracy. But neither is it an absolute autocracy in the mold of, say, Cuba or North Korea. It sits somewhere in between. It is a semiauthoritarian regime in democratic clothing. That is to say, Russia pretends to be democratic. In this imitation democracy, formal institutions that appear democratic conceal a system that is at once authoritarian, oligarchic, and bureaucratic to the point of paralysis. It’s hard to decipher the line between real and fake. Yes, Russia has political parties, a parliament, trade unions, and youth movements. But in reality they are all Potemkin villages. Russia’s elites have been perfecting such masquerades for centuries. Today, the Kremlin even humors a marginal liberal opposition and other forms of dissent that, unintentionally, by their very presence, are part of the sham.

This pseudo democracy may turn out to be even more dangerous and destructive than the pure autocracy Russians suffered for decades. Authoritarian or totalitarian regimes at some point create a longing for freedom. Imitation democracies, on the other hand, only serve to discredit liberal democratic institutions and principles, and the citizens living within them may at some point actually prefer a real “iron hand.” That is not to say that the cause of Russian democracy is without hope. Russians elected both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin expecting that they would ensure order, support democracy, and achieve Western...