His Big Gamble.(Vladimir Putin)(Brief Article)

Vladimir Putin has been enjoying the limelight. He's been lionized by NATO and feted by Tony Blair. His speech to the German Parliament got raves. Even President George W. Bush seems to be taking a softer line on Moscow's military campaign in Chechnya. But outsiders don't always understand a blunt fact of Russian political life: popularity abroad can be dangerous at home.

Like Blair, Putin sees his world at a turning point. The international war against terror offered a choice: traditional go-it-alone Russian isolation, or fully embracing the West. He chose the latter, to the cheers of the United States and its allies--and the consternation of both allies and enemies at home. Putin's new thinking is far ahead of the average Russian's. (Polls show nearly half think the attacks "served the Americans right.") And it's light-years beyond the military and intelligence circles that he depends on for power. A backlash could compromise his leadership--and prompt him to pull back from the new alliance with the West. In backing U.S. action against the Taliban, in other words, Putin has taken an enormous personal gamble.

His many critics expect a payoff, a geopolitical quid pro quo, even if he himself might not. Without it, Putin's good times could sour. By rights, Russia's elite should be thrilled at the chance of winning Western backing for a crackdown on terrorists in Chechnya and Central Asia. Indeed, high-ranking officials admit that they see Islamic fundamentalism as a threat even greater than Bush's plans for a national missile defense. So what's the problem?

In Russian eyes, the last decade has been a series of unfulfilled promises and slaps in the face by the West. Mikhail Gorbachev thought that Soviet acceptance of a unified Germany meant that NATO would not expand eastward. Just a few years later, the alliance took in three former Warsaw Pact countries. Boris Yeltsin disavowed Russian imperial ambitions in the former Soviet Union, only to watch U.S. companies and governments squeeze in. Yeltsin-era reformers felt betrayed by the IMF and the World Bank, which they saw as failing to adequately support reforms that Moscow undertook under their direction. And then came the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Russia helped persuade its old ally to surrender, yet has had little say in its affairs since.

Call it the Gorbachev-Yeltsin syndrome. ...