Volume 52, Number 2 · February 10, 2005
The Emperor Putin
By Robert Cottrell
Cold Peace: Russia's New Imperialism
by Janusz Bugajski
Praeger/Center for Strategic and International Studies, 302 pp., $49.95
Inside Putin's Russia: Can There be Reform Without Democracy?
by Andrew Jack
Oxford University Press, 362 pp., $30.00
Run your finger around the borders of Russia, and you begin to realize what a worrying place the world must seem when viewed from the Kremlin. Ukraine, supposedly the closest and best-loved of Russia's immediate neighbors, has just biffed its big brother on the nose by electing a West-backed president, Viktor Yushchenko. Three other neighbors or near neighbors of Russia—Belarus, Turkmenistan, and North Korea—are run by dictators whose grasp of reality is open to question. Unstable autocrats run the rest of Central Asia. Georgia and Moldova are crippled by illegal Russian-sponsored secessionist regimes on their soil. Armenia and Azerbaijan teeter on the brink of renewed war. Dialogue with Japan has been hostage for decades to arguments about four disputed islands of negligible value. The Baltic states are the objects of a Russian government hate campaign. Relations with the rest of the European Union are at their chilliest since the cold war. The rise of China, and its imagined designs on the Russian far east, are the long-term worry that keeps the Kremlin awake at night. That leaves Mongolia for comfort.
Review, 4411 words
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