Comrade Putin's New Russia.(Vladimir Putin)(Statistical Data Included)

Eighteen-year-old Andrei Korshunov doesn't remember much about the Soviet Union. But from what his parents tell him, it sounds pretty swell: there was no crime, there was little inflation and everyone had a job. Its cities were orderly and clean, nothing like chaotic St. Petersburg, where Korshunov came of age in the 1990s--Russia's "criminal capital," famous for gangland shootings, prostitution and drugs.

Nostalgic for a period he never knew, Korshunov recently took a tiny step back in time. Last October, St. Petersburg revived a Soviet-era institution called the druzhina--civilian patrols that help the police by maintaining order and reporting other citizens' suspicious behavior. A few weeks ago Korshunov signed up. Now, decked out in a green vest and a red armband, he's earning about $20 a month while he gets his university education and does his part to make Russia wholesome again. "In the old days, [the druzhina] were workers," says one of his friends, 19-year-old Aleksandr Dorokhov. "But now they want to attract students... to make us feel like we're doing something meaningful."

In an age of want and disillusionment, Russians seem to be searching for meaning--and they're rushing back to the past to find it. Weary of the economic hardships of the last 10 years, frustrated by the rise in violent crime and corruption, embarrassed by the fall from superpower greatness, Russians are salvaging from the detritus of empire relics most observers believed had vanished with the Berlin wall. From attitudes to institutions, Russia is witnessing an extraordinary revival of things Soviet. And the man of the moment, President Vladimir Putin, is ably leading them. "People are tired of laxity," said Putin shortly after being named acting president last year.

His idea of reform is not to return to communism, a governing idea that remains dead and buried. Instead, Putin has gradually and artfully worked to bring back elements of the old regime that can give most Russians the promise of what they yearn for: a strong motherland able once more to stand its ground in a hostile world. It's the old Soviet system without the bite of Leninist ideology and the cold war--a kind of Soviet Lite for the 21st century. Its hallmarks are a politics organized tightly around the president, his powerful Kremlin administration, his custom-tailored Unity Party--and a new elite drawn largely from the old KGB and the military. And it encourages a foreign policy bent on countering American hegemony and reasserting Russia's great-power status.

Putin's supporters say he's simply answering a popular longing: the vast majority of Russians miss the U.S.S.R. and express enduring respect for leaders like Leonid Brezhnev and V. I. Lenin. (In one recent poll, 79 percent of those surveyed said they regretted the collapse of the U.S.S.R.; only 15 percent didn't.) But Putin's critics charge that something far more sinister is at hand: the gradual demolition of democracy. Says Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, "Putin is creating a bureaucratic police state."

No one is suggesting that the gulag and Gosplan (the central planning apparatus) are making a comeback. A global economy, wider access to information and the freedom to travel have all left their mark on Russia. Three million Russians use the Internet. In 2000, 8 million Russians traveled abroad, compared with 5.5 million in 1999. Even Russia's ailing economy has benefited from globalization: exports in 2000 topped $102 billion, compared with $54 billion in 1993. "Most of the country has changed dramatically," argues Andrei Kortunov, a Moscow political analyst.

That has not stopped Putin from consolidating enormous personal power. Recently the Unity Party, Putin's docile political organization, announced it was merging with three other parties, including its erstwhile rival, the Fatherland Party of Moscow's Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and former prime minister Yevgeni Primakov. The result, say analysts, will be a hypertrophied "party of power" that will give Putin virtually undisputed control over the lower house of Parliament. (He gutted the power of the upper house last year.) Critics say the move amounts to the creation of a "new Politburo."