From Russia, with regression analysis

I stole that title from Andrew Leonard. It was just too good. His summary of the article is probably better than the real thing (He recommends instead the NYRB's "Russia's Managed Democracy")

The latter article has an excellent historical summary of the foundations of Putin's presidency, the reasons it has been so successful, and then a really interesting cultural survey of present-day Russia that paints it as "retro-tsarist".

In outlook on near-future political scene, Putin's could choose to extend his term and the parliament would do it. He has evidently been reading one Ivan Ilin, "then a semi-Fascist émigré in Germany." From this the author concludes that he would not move a step closer to dictatorship ,"since this would require too great an ideological upheaval." I'm not sure why it would, nor am I sure this Ilin was 'semi-Fascist' (whatever that means!) - from his bio at the Michigan State archive of his papers, he was fired from a post in Berlin for refusing to propagandize Nazism in class. (He seems an interesting case: Lenin so admired his analysis of Hegel that he ordered him released! Counter-example to Bukharin / Rubashov in the later Purges.)

And the original article that Leonard reviews is about two classes of Russian oligarchs that emerged in the Yelstin era: old Soviet insiders and the ousider new capitalists who bought up industries (and happened to be Jewish). These latter became changed by the Soviet institutional culture (...of corruption!). When Yelstin's term ended they tried to pick a strongman-seeming puppet... but got an actual strongman.