Just as economic booms amplify a country's assets, so busts magnify their frailties. This crisis is rapidly exposing the design flaws in Vladimir Putin's project: the failure to create impartial state institutions; the elimination of constitutional checks and balances; and a potentially brittle social compact dependent on the Kremlin delivering the economic goods. In such dangerous times it is all the more urgent for the west and Russia to devise new rules of engagement.
First, though, the west must acknowledge it has “lost” Russia and try to understand why. The hopes of the early 1990s that Russia would evolve into an instinctively pro-western partner have evaporated. Opinion polls show anti-western feelings are now deeply rooted in Russian society, irrespective of age, geography or income. Like much of the Muslim world, Russia feels humiliated by the west. It is determined to pursue a separate destiny.
Undoubtedly, the west has contributed to Russia's anti-westernism. In the 1990s the west was guilty of doing both too little and too much to help post- Soviet Russia. It did not provide enough financial assistance to transform the Russian economy. Yet the International Monetary Fund, unfairly entrusted with managing the west's relationship with Russia, was heavily implicated in the economic misery of the 1990s – even if that misery was inevitable given the ruination of the Soviet economy and low commodity prices. “We have twice tried to take western theories and apply them in Russia: Marxism and liberalism. We must rely on our own thinking and values now,” says Andrei Klimov, a parliamentary deputy.