Russia's New Normal.(World Affairs)(Book review)

The Cold War may be over, but that doesn't mean the threat from the Kremlin has entirely disappeared.

Edward Lucas is much too smart an observer, with more than enough experience in both the old Soviet bloc and the new Russia, not to concede the obvious. Russia is no longer a closed society, he points out, and "most Russians have never had it so good," which accounts for President Vladimir Putin's consistently high approval ratings. A veteran correspondent for The Economist, Lucas also is willing to admit that Russia isn't a global adversary since it works with the West, even if testily, on any number of diplomatic issues, including Iran and North Korea. "The old Cold War is indeed over," he concludes.

So why is his new book titled "The New Cold War: The Future of Russia and the Threat to the West" (272 pages. Palgrave Macmillan)? Partly because it's a meticulously constructed indictment of Putin's strong-arm tactics at home and his increasingly aggressive tone in dealing with any country that tries to question his actions. And partly because Lucas is appalled by what he sees as the West's deliberate blindness when it comes to Russia. The biggest mistake the West keeps making, he argues, is to assume that Russia is in the process of becoming a "normal" country. While it may be too weak militarily now to threaten others the way it once did, he believes the Kremlin is fighting a new cold war with "cash, natural resources, diplomacy, and propaganda."

Lucas demonstrates how the historical revisionism of the Putin era has set the stage for this new struggle. First of all, Soviet-era myths have been revived. Stalin is once again hailed as "one of the most successful leaders of the USSR." His "mistakes"--which include the mass murder of his own people--are less important than his role in industrializing the country and leading it to victory in World War II. This conveniently sanitizes such events as the annexation of the Baltic states, which helps the Kremlin justify its current belligerence toward Estonia. At home, the same revisionism allows ex-KGB agents to rule, since that organization's role in the mass killings has been swept under the rug. The Stalinist past, Lucas notes, "is the source of both the Kremlin's xenophobia and its authoritarianism."

The other key bit of revisionism concerns the recent past. To justify his crackdown on the media and any political opposition, Putin has portrayed the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin as a period of unmitigated disasters ...