Power First, Economics Later.(Russia)

Actually, this country lends itself marvelously to all kinds of fraud. Russia is always governed by deceit.

Is the author of those words describing (a) Tsarist Russia, (b) the Soviet Union or (c) Russia today? The correct answer, since the writer was Marquis de Custine, the famous French visitor to Russia in 1839, is (a). But it's easy to conceive of another acceptable answer: (d) all of the above. What's remarkable about the uproar over President Vladimir Putin's battle with mega-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who announced his resignation as head of Yukos Oil from his jail cell last week, is how eerily it strengthens the impression that Russian history is a continuum--no matter how dramatic the break between one era and the next.

I first reported from Moscow at the tail end of Leonid Brezhnev's "era of stagnation" in the early 1980s. It was a time when de Custine's trenchant observations provided ready ammunition for those who argued that the Soviet system was a natural product of Russia's history. Harvard historian Richard Pipes, a leading proponent of that view, talked about "the continuity of the police mentality in Russia irrespective of the regime." (De Custine again: "In Russia, fear replaces, that is to say, paralyzes thought.") On a visit to Moscow after Khodorkovsky's arrest for alleged economic crimes, I found the discussion about its deeper implications--does it expose Russian capitalism and Putin's "managed democracy" as a sham?--quite familiar.

I knew the Soviet Union, and Russia today is no Soviet Union. It looks, feels and is different. And likewise, the Soviet system was far different from its regal predecessor. Pipes asserted that the Soviet system was a logical extension of tsarist repression. In fact, it was a quantum leap, making the prerevolutionary regime's tactics look amateurish compared with the wholesale terror unleashed by Lenin and Stalin. But even if we're talking about three distinct periods of Russian history, they contain common elements that emerge most clearly in a crisis like the Khodorkovsky affair.

At the top of the list is the propensity of Russian rulers to think about power first and economics later--which explains why Russia has never lived up to its economic potential. Khodorkovsky's arrest jolted the stock market and gave foreign investors a case of the jitters. And then what happened? Instead of trying to calm the nerves of the business community--Yukos is the biggest company in Russia's most important industry--a government minister sparked a new scare by suggesting that the company could "immediately lose the licenses for its ...