The flowery, longish piece doesn't necessarily go into depth. But that is the nature of the mass audience weekly that Time magazine is. It's worth a read though.
In the first paragraph, Time reporter Adi Ignatius begins to paint a picture of the "new tsar":
"No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking."It's a very different description than one would attribute to our president, who also has a spooky stare. Bush's stare involves lots of blinking and is more of the deer-caught-in-the-headlights variety.
A running theme of the piece is the conventional wisdom that Russia's economic and diplomatic resurgence is related to Putin's authoritarianism. My impression is that is the conventional wisdom within Russia as well. But I wonder if it really does bear out. Certainly, Putin has slid closer and closer to totalitarianism. A recent potential political opponent had to withdraw from the presidential election because the government had successfully prevented his nomination convention from occurring in time.
Yes, the political opposition in Russia apparently doesn't have their act together. But it can't help that Putin's government jails press and opponents and controls all the institutions. And I don't know how much allegedly following those who are vocal to other countries and murdering them with radioactive poison can be linked to economic success of Russia in recent years.
Though, I'm only a casual, ill-informed American and don't really have an idea what is the real story in Russia. I'd be interested to hear from those who know better than I.
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