Joshua Rubenstein, a regional director of Amnesty International and the author of “Stalin’s Secret Pogrom” pens this Wall Street Journal ($) review of James H. Billington‘s new book, “Russia In Search of Itself,” and notes as follows:

More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West has only begun to confront a disheartening paradox: That at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, the prospects for democratic reform seemed more promising than they do today in a nominally democratic post-Soviet era.
The Russian media, including television news, once carried far more critical discussions of Stalin’s crimes. Intellectual journals reached millions of readers and explored the country’s history and politics, and its economic failings. And the parliamentary elections of 1989 confirmed that liberal, independent-minded figures, like the physicist and veteran dissident Andrei Sakharov, could run against the Communist Party and command sizable support.
But the country’s badly managed attempts at capitalism and democracy in the 1990s have soured a majority of the population. Privatizatsiia, or privatization, of the country’s industrial and natural resources has resulted in such an audacious pattern of grand theft that Russians have coined the term prikhvatizatsiia, or confiscation, to mock the process. The brutal war in Chechnya continues to inflict untold suffering on civilians. Meanwhile the rule of law is a hollow shell. Since 1994, nine members of the country’s Parliament, and 130 journalists, have been murdered, no doubt because they either sought to expose the truth about official corruption and organized crime or because their political activity got in the way of someone’s plans to turn a fast buck.

And Mr. Billington does not lay the blame for these developments solely at the feet of Russian President Vladimar Putin:

Vladimir Putin alone is not responsible for this collapse of liberal hopes. It was Boris Yeltsin who insisted on too much power for the office of the presidency. And with increasing government control of the mass media, there remain few outlets for critical reporting on Mr. Putin’s policies. The increasing appeal of Russian nationalism has brought with it frequent, physical attacks on foreign-looking outsiders, including dark-skinned people from the Caucasus, African students and even U.S. Embassy Marine guards, as well as assaults on Jews and Jewish institutions. Mr. Putin has condemned such provocations only half-heartedly. . . Under Mr. Putin’s leadership, the country is moving toward “some original Russian variant of a corporatist state ruled by a dictator, adorned with Slavophile rhetoric, and representing, in effect, fascism with a friendly face.” In other words, a type of regime that seeks to maintain order “through a Pinochet interlude.”