A Respectable Russia.(Cover Story: World Affairs; EUROPE)(Cover story)

Byline: Owen Matthews; With Anna Nemtsova In Crimea

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Correction: Our Sept. 1 article "A Respectable Russia" incorrectly identified the capital of Kazakhstan. It is Astana, not Almaty. And the population figures on the accompanying map referred to the total population of each country, not their Russian populations as the label stated. The percentages of Russians living in each country are listed correctly. NEWSWEEK regrets the error.

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Vladimir Putin's war has intensified the debate over his nation's future.

On a concert podium set up last week in the ruins of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, Russia's greatest conductor took a deep breath of smoke-scented air and raised his baton. Valery Gergiev, a native Ossetian and godfather to Vladimir Putin's younger daughter, launched into a passionate rendition of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony as Russian troops looked on from their armored personnel carriers. Millions more Russians watched via satellite link. Officially, the concert was a tribute to the victims of this month's fighting in the breakaway republic. But to many Russians, the concert was freighted with political symbolism. For viewers with an eye for such things, it was a mirror image of Leonard Bernstein's rendition of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the fallen Berlin wall in December 1989. Gergiev was playing for dead Ossetians, no doubt--but for many, he was also marking the symbolic end to Russia's post-cold-war retreat. And, indeed, this triumphalist turn in the aftermath of its lightning invasion of Georgia earlier this month suggests that after almost 20 years of humiliation, Russia has finally recovered what it has been so longing for: respect. "We do not wish to aggravate the international situation," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told a group of Red Army veterans in Kursk recently. "We simply want respect for our state, for our people, for our values."

Such a goal was the hallmark of Vladimir Putin's two terms as president. Ever since he came to power in 2000, Putin, now prime minister, has dreamed of reversing the decline in Russia's power over its own backyard. But while he talked a big game, harking back to the rhetoric of Soviet and tsarist Russian imperialism, Russia's actual power shrank dramatically. Between 2000 and 2004, pro-Moscow regimes in Ukraine and Georgia were replaced by pro-Western ones. NATO expanded to include the Baltics, in clear violation of security guarantees that Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, claimed were given to him in the 1990s. And Russia has proved to be powerless in stopping the United States from stationing missile defense radars and missile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic.