Unfortunately, at a time when the credibility of Western capitalism itself is under the greatest strain in living memory - when The Economist's local tender, the British pound, is itself plunging towards virtual parity with the dollar (even as the Russian ruble firms up with oil prices) - this kind of reporting on Putin's Russia only reinforces the deep ethnocentrism and ideological skew that the Anglo-American elite is ever more on the defensive about. It really goes to show how the big bankers and media bosses of London and New York are the ones who feel perhaps even more under siege these days than Putin and his inner circle in the Kremlin.
The inherent subtext of this kind of Putin-bashing (and Russia-bashing, to be quite honest) is as questionable as it is blatant: Western "free market democracy" is the only valid system, and Russia must still copy it to the hilt or be left behind in the dark ages.
Only this time, the joke could really be on the Western ruling class and not its Russian equivalent. The public can't be fooled as easily anymore by the stranglehold of "mainstream" corporate-controlled media. If Putin's Russia were so weak and cowardly whereas the West were still so strong both materially and morally, just why is Moscow on a regional rampage in both Europe and the Middle East at the expense of NATO and the US?
This isn't at all to suggest that Russia isn't in fact weak and vulnerable: it clearly is. Only apparently not as much as the feckless and disoriented West.
From Putin on down, the Russian elite and people alike seem to enjoy the most enduring strength of any country: unity. Sure, this is largely a function of ruthless repression of dissent, but even the West can't deny that this itself is only possible because of a huge apparatus of support for Putinism that's staffed by millions of ordinary Russian citizens who apparently share their leader's hardline views.
Even as The Economist and other mouthpieces of the transatlantic plutocracy have increasingly lamented the spectacular failures of their social-engineering schemes of non-Western societies since the end of the Cold War, they still speak as though somehow this hasn't damaged the validity of the very notion that the world should and must become a carbon copy of the liberal-universalist West. And even less do they seem to recognize that it's precisely this arrogant defensiveness that's exposed them to a groundswell of revolt even by their own purportedly "free" subjects.
No, Russia's not a society in decline: the West is. The low birthrate in Russia - which has already long since leveled off - is not a failure of Russian values but evidence of Western decadence. The country's sexual promiscuity, high abortion rate, and so on are of primarily Western import - not a poor reflection of traditional Russian spirituality and morality. It is precisely these family-destroying forces which act and spread in the name of "liberation" that Putinism is rightly trying to roll back and smash, whether across the vast Russian empire itself or in its muscular interventionism in the Muslim world.
It is Russia, not the West, which has belatedly found - largely through its much-reviled Chechen counterinsurgency - a kind of correct balanced approach to the conundrum of fundamentalist Islam that Western liberal triumphalism will never willfully embrace: a loose federalism which gives "Sharia-ism" sufficient space for limited localized expression, overseen by local but loyal vassals of undeniably and unabashedly Islamist strain.
The West cannot fathom such a compromise: if you're not "with us", you're "against us" - read: either you fully copy our model of "free markets" and "civil society", which in practice mean gender-relational anarchy and consumerist-materialist dissipation and nihilism, or you're worthy of extermination like Saddam and Qaddafi.
That of course doesn't prevent the West from making its bed with radical head-chopping jihadists where it sees fit: as the Syrian conflict conclusively proves, Western elites have no qualms aiding and abetting LGBT roof-hurlers (Al Qaeda-linked terrorists) against LGBT protectors (the Assad regime) so long as it furthers their true designs of weakening the real competition for global supremacy - Russia and its emergent authoritarian axis of China, Iran, and now increasingly Turkey and the rest of the West-disillusioned Arab-Islamic world.
To conclude, the West is correct that Putinism is a repudiation of its own hypocrisies and shortfalls in living up to its own stated integrity and consistency of morality. It's wrong and shortsighted, however, to simply dismiss Russia as not standing for anything more substantive of its own accord, even if not particularly positive: Russia is setting itself up once more as the West's Vengeance from Above, the Eastern Assyria or Babylon raised up to chastise - by fire - the hopelessly wayward Whore of the Western Jerusalem.
This could well be just the kick in the rear the West needs to get its act together again. Better yet, we in the West can always hope and pray that this Babylon will itself be swallowed up by Persia: a far more enlightened and benign absolutism than we're inclined to think even possible, which inspires even ourselves to pay closer heed to our own fidelity to genuine progress and progressivism. (No speculation will be proffered here as to Russia's actual evolving partnership and quasi-alliance with Iran.)
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