Russia these days reminds us of a middle-class man who spends his life savings to buy a shiny new red Ferrari without realizing that the purchase will leave him with no funds to pay for gas, much less costly repairs or insurance. He charges out of the dealership onto the highway headed for a cross-country trek, only to run out of gas before he leaves his own state and ends up hitchhiking down the highway.

Bedazzled by an oil revenue windfall and its sparkly effects on Moscow, some Russophiles have forgotten there's a country out there, one that requires maintenance if it is survive. Just as in Tsarist and Soviet times, modern Russia's oligarchs ignore the welfare of the masses and burn their candle at both its ends.

It will not last the night, and as we reported on Monday the light it gives is far from lovely.

Take, for instance, a report on Monday from Bloomberg News about Lake Baikal:

Lake Baikal is warming faster than the atmosphere, challenging the idea that large bodies of water can withstand global warming, U.S. and Russian scientists said. Baikal, which holds 20 percent of the world's fresh water, has warmed by 1.21 degrees Celsius since 1946, said Marianne Moore, assistant professor of biological sciences at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Global temperatures have risen 0.76 degrees Celsius since industrialization, a United Nations panel on climate change said in March. The Siberian lake holds more than 2,500 plant and animal species, including the world's only exclusively freshwater seal, and some could become extinct by continued warming, said Moore, co-author of a report on Lake Baikal to be published this month in the journal Global Change Biology. The study challenges the idea that thermal inertia of oceans, seas and large lakes would make them more resistant to climate change, Moore said. "The warming that we're seeing in this lake is of more concern than that of any other lake because of the extraordinary biodiversity," Moore said. "You could potentially lose the Baikal seal." Beginning in the 1940s, data on Lake Baikal was collected by Mikhail Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University. The research was carried on by his daughter and granddaughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, a co-author of the journal article. The family has taken samples of the lake every seven to 10 days since 1946, amassing a history that Moore analyzed. The data revealed that the lake's average summer temperature has increased by 2.4 degrees, Moore said. "My jaw just dropped to the floor when I heard this," Moore said. "I was extremely surprised that the data set even existed."

The New York Times adds: "Dr. Izmesteva and her colleagues pay for their work in part with fees they earn by consulting or doing environmental impact assessments. They sustain the program any way they can." In other words, without support from the Putin regime in Moscow. Such support would, of course, divert funds from Putin's parade of tanks through Red Square on Friday and all the other cold-war provocations he has in mind. But if Russia intends to keep control over the world's single largest portion of national territory (by a wide margin) then it will have to bear the world's largest maintenance costs. If it doesn't pay those costs, the nation will dissolve into rust and then be gobbled up by others who will. That's the law of nature.

But Russia shows no inclination whatsoever to do so. The Kremlin would prefer to spend Russia's ready cash on renewal of the cold war conflict with the West, and the people do not seem willing to lift a finger to stop that. Russia stands to lose one-third of its population in the next half-century, a far greater blow than any ever inflicted by a foreign enemy in war, yet the government is silent and the population demands no action, much less change of policy or regime. There is no environmental movement in Russia, because there is no support for one in the population. There is no racial justice movement, no women's rights movement, and indeed no real opposition of any kind to the edicts of the malignant little troll who prowls the Kremlin's parapets by night, spitting on the hapless denizens of his land from on high for his amusement.

Below, we report on Putin's plans to spend piles of money on an outrageous neo-Soviet parade of military hardware through Red Square. Who could ask for any more emphatic proof of Russia's neo-Soviet intentions than this? In another item we report below, Radio Free Europe calls it "a deliberate throwback to the country's communist past, when millions of people watched live on television as the Soviet Union celebrated its vast military might." And so it is, in more ways than one: Ass the report below shows, just as in Soviet times these actions are mere illusions, more efforts to create a Potemkin Village and dupe the unwary, both at home and abroad, into thinking that Russia is more than it is. How dare Putin simultaneously decry the expansion of NATO and parade armaments before a slack-jawed world? Is this man insane?

Dmitry Oreshkin, a Russian political analyst, thinks so. He tells RFE: "Putin gives free rein to the Soviet dream. The huge number of people who were brought up in a military tradition, and who conceive the world in terms of the West wanting to enslave them, have the painful feeling that Russia lacks tanks. So why not show them these tanks? Why not roll them across Red Square? Let them watch, shed a few tears, and calm down."

Frankly speaking, though, even if we despise Vladimir Putin, sometimes we empathize with him. Like the rulers of Russia who have come before him, how can he but be infuriated by the craven indifference of the population, by their dogged refusal to stand up and be counted for any reason? Why should he do anything differently, if the people of the country don't demand it? Why should he take any risks when he knows full well that any call for national effort will fall on deaf ears? Why shouldn't he conclude that he rules over a nation of cattle, and proceed accordingly?

Surely, that frustration was just as well known to Tsar Peter, and Lenin, and Stalin, and indeed to Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

The Associated Press reports:

For the first time in post-Soviet Russia, tanks and nuclear missile launchers are to rumble across Red Square on Friday, in a seemingly fearsome parade of military might.

The message to the world, two days after Dmitry Medvedev succeeds Vladimir Putin as president, should be clear: Russia is again a major military power.

"This isn't saber-rattling," Putin insisted Monday. "We are not threatening anyone."

And indeed, for all the investment in the military — an eightfold increase to an annual $40 billion during Putin's eight years in office — experts say it still has a long way to go to restore its Soviet-era might. "Our armed forces are merely a bad copy of the Soviet army," said retired Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a former arms control expert with the Russian Defense Ministry.

The annual Victory Day parade that marks Nazi Germany's defeat may look impressive, but some Russian commentators think much of the military spending has been squandered through corruption, cronyism and mismanagement. Although in better shape than in the years immediately after the Soviet Union dissolved, the military remains an example of Russia's inability to use its eight-year oil bonanza to overhaul decrepit infrastructure and institutions.

The Soviet Union was bankrupted two decades ago by centralized planning and state dominance of the economy. After the sale of public assets in the 1990s, the state under Putin has expanded its role, and plans to create huge new government-owned military and technological conglomerates. But the army, the pension system, public health, secondary education and the road system have all eroded on Putin's watch, former government ministers Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov wrote in a recent report, "Putin: The Bottom Line." The main cause, they charge, is "Russia's dive into an unprecedented mire of corruption" that flows throughout the government.

INDEM, a Moscow-based research foundation, has reported that the volume of corrupt business conducted in Russia rose from $36 billion in 2001 to around $319 billion in 2005, its latest published data. The military budget accounts for around 4.6 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, roughly on a par with China and the U.S. But the generals don't let cash reach the grass roots where it's most needed, says security analyst Andrei Soldatov, and this "is leaving Russia's rapid-reaction armed forces in particularly bad shape."

The military's problems may be one reason why Medvedev repeatedly sounds the alarm about corruption, calling it "the gravest disease which has struck our society." Putin's Kremlin has poured $150 billion into its armed services, yet those services remain saddled with old weaponry and facilities. As part of an effort to reclaim Russia's previous status as a great military power, Putin has resumed long-range bomber patrols, boasted of developing a new strategic missile and threatened to deploy missiles closer to the heart of Europe. But only a handful of new combat jets and several dozen tanks have been added in recent years. Soviet submarines still frequently need repair and rarely leave their bases.

A new nuclear sub, the Yury Dolgoruky, cannot be deployed because the Bulava ballistic missile it was supposed to carry has failed tests. When the vessel eventually sails, it will likely only make training cruises, according to a report by the Federation of American Scientists. "Russia no longer maintains a continuous sea-based deterrent patrol posture like that of the United States, Britain and France, but instead has shifted to a new posture where it occasionally deploys a submarine for training purposes," the report said.

Military service is mandatory, but conditions are brutal and less than 10 percent of males end up in uniform, according to a 2007 study for the Swedish Research Institute of National Defense. Russia's declining population has also left it with a shrinking pool of draftees. According to population expert Murray Feshbach at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, young men being inducted into the military today are neither as healthy nor as educated as they were in the Soviet times.

Military communications also lag. The introduction of Russia's answer to America's GPS satellite navigation system was postponed this year due to equipment shortages. Basics like night-vision goggles, portable radios and satellite phones are scarce. The bottom line is that "the Russian military forces are in a bad state, and the situation is getting worse," said Alexander Khramchikhin, chief analyst at the Institute of Military and Political Analysis. So Russia increasingly relies on its nuclear missiles for defense. The weaker its army, the quicker it might resort to atomic weapons in a crisis, some analysts fear. "It's a very destabilizing concept," said Alexander Pikayev, head of military policy research at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.

Russians, meanwhile, worry that with the Soviet-era missile arsenal aging, Moscow will find it harder to maintain nuclear parity with the U.S. Still, things are better than in the 1990s. Jets and navy ships are no longer idled for lack of fuel. Wage hikes and better training have made troops more combat-ready. The return of heavy weapons to the annual celebration is "a demonstration of our growing defense capabilities," Putin said in remarks broadcast on state television Monday. "We are able to defend our people, our citizens, our state, our riches — of which there is quite a lot." But Putin, who is staying on as prime minister, and President-elect Medvedev, face formidable challenges if they want to do more than parade military hardware in Red Square, and turn Russia's armed services into a modern fighting force. Unlike 10 years ago, Russia today has the means to pursue these goals. All it needs now is the political will. Pikayev said Friday's parade shows it now has that will. "It demonstrates that Russia has risen from its knees and is prepared to do everything to make its concerns heard," he said.

Britain's Channel 4 News reports:

As President Vladimir Putin prepares to hand Russia's presidency to his chosen successor, Unreported World travels deep into the country's Arctic North to examine his legacy. Reporter Sam Kiley and director Nick Sturdee discover a nation where political dissent is stifled, corruption is rife, and where little of Russia's huge wealth reaches a population racked by poverty, alcoholism and suicide.

Kiley and Sturdee begin their journey in Syktyvkar, capital of the Komi Republic and 1000 miles north of Moscow. It's election day for the Russian Parliament and the team has been tipped off that political parties are handing out money to buy votes. Kiley meets student activists who claim they have been offered 400 rubles to vote for President Putin's United Russia Party. In dramatic scenes which support claims that polls in some electoral areas were rigged, the team films a student negotiating her payment from her United Russia contact and others queuing to sell their votes as well.

The Unreported World team boards a train to take the "Railway of Bones" built by Stalin's Gulag prisoners northwards to Usinsk, the region's oil capital. Russia now earns more than £75 billion a year from oil exports, but little seems to be reaching the people here. Many of the workers who built the town are housed in barracks and one of them tells Kiley that it would take nine years, without eating or paying any bills, to save enough money to buy a one-room apartment in the town they built. In this small one-industry town two oil companies own the newspapers. The leader of the opposition Other Russia movement says that oppression is in the air, and that parties not sanctioned by the Kremlin struggle.

As the team travels further north they find once wealthy logging towns like Ust Tsilma in the grip of an alcoholism pandemic. In a nation which Putin has supposedly reignited the wealth and pride of the Soviet era, Kiley meets Igor, a youth worker in the town of Izhma. He says he knows ten children and 20 adults who have killed themselves in the town, which he says has long been abandoned to its fate.

At the end of the railway is the city of Vorkuta, which was originally a Gulag labour camp. Today its residents are free but, apparently, only if they keep their mouths firmly shut. Liudmila Zhorovlia, a community activist who campaigned against local authorities over price rises in rents and services did not. Her husband Ivan shows Kiley where his wife and 19-year-old son Konstantin were slaughtered in their own home minutes after he left for work. Their killers took nothing he says, but he claims, they did erase files detailing Liudmilla's campaign from her computer. He says the investigation has been closed for lack of evidence.

Back in Syktyvkar, Kiley interviews Yuri Bolobonov, United Russia's deputy leader for the Komi Republic. He is dismissive of the complaints of a growing one-party state in Russia and the rigging of elections, which he blames on rival parties trying to make United Russia look bad. He says Russia is a huge country and it needs a big powerful party. As the team leaves, Kiley concludes that it's clear a one-party Russia might be good for business, and good for politicians, but it seems that very few ordinary citizens he's encountered think it is good for Russians themselves.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is now officially under massive assault, at long last, from America's major media. First the New York Times came out with a huge front-page article exposing the Russian dictatorship, complete with a translation into Russian, and now the Chicago Tribune reports on Potemkin Russia's total failure to deliver an improved quality of live outside Moscow:

Behind a scrim of billionaires and petrodollars, Russian cities like this one are dying a slow, quiet death deep in the frigid, remote Far East. Many Russians here haven't worked for more than a decade. They survive on whatever they can lug on their scrap carts—radiators and washing machines, bricks and bathtubs scavenged from a cityscape of boarded-up buildings. Scalpels at the hospital here are brown with rust. Every month, a local heating utility sends collectors to families who haven't paid a bill in nine years. Factories that churned out everything from Soviet-era mortar shells and mines to linoleum and cardboard wasted away years ago, leaving a city of 47,000 without work, or any sense of purpose.

The cold, dark second-floor household of the Chursin family sums up life in Amursk. Natalya Chursina and her husband feed and clothe their teenage son, Zhenya, on welfare payments that amount to $5 a day. At 14, Zhenya has decided that school is optional. When he skips class in winter, he and his friends hop onto ice floes and ride them like skiffs through the roiled waters of the Amur River. It's a place and a life Chursina and her husband, Vladimir, desperately want their son to escape. "People die like flies here," says Chursina, 41. "Everything here is on the decline."

The energy wealth that wrested much of Russia from the brink of an economic abyss and gave the Kremlin its newfound swagger has yet to revive cities like Amursk. On Sunday, Russians are expected to elect as their new president Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's longtime protege and a loyal adherent to his blueprint for prosperity. But eight years after Putin began implementing that blueprint, a hidden Russia still languishes, masked by Moscow's moneyed extravagance and conspicuous consumption. Most of Russia's 119,000 millionaires live in greater Moscow, the world's most expensive city, amid a burgeoning middle class that has discovered mortgages and jams the aisles of the capital's two Ikea stores. Move beyond the capital's showy facade and you find a vulnerable Russia—a national population evaporating at a rate of 720,000 people each year and an aging, neglected infrastructure.

Russia's economic resurgence has been both real and remarkable. It now has the world's third-largest collection of billionaires and a gross domestic product growing by nearly 7 percent every year. The ruble is getting stronger. Overall, poverty and unemployment are down. Yet that resurgence has its limits. In Siberia and the Russian Far East, a population of 30.6 million withers at a rate of 103,000 people each year, victims of wayward Soviet planning that put whole cities in one of the planet's coldest expanses.

Dilapidated Soviet-era infrastructure from roads and electrical grids to housing and telephone lines saps Russia's productivity. In much of the country, factories saddled with aging, outdated machinery lag far behind their counterparts in the U.S., China and Southeast Asia. The Russian Academy of Sciences says more than half of Russia's industrial machinery is over 20 years old, compared to just 15 percent in 1990.

In the waning years of his presidency, Putin has begun trumpeting the need to shore up debilitated infrastructure, revamp health care and solve the country's worrisome population plunge. But analysts believe he could have acted much sooner. His decision to serve as prime minister alongside Medvedev could give him the chance to make up for lost time. "These problems have worsened over the course of many years. Now when they're very serious, they're getting noticed," said Nikolay Petrov, a former Kremlin adviser and an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, a Moscow think tank affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The price for not doing anything about this for years will be huge."

A weak Russia—one that cannot sustain a labor force, restore its social safety net or rebuild decaying infrastructure—risks becoming an unstable Russia. And instability in a country with the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council poses a danger the U.S. and Western Europe can ill afford. "Their infrastructure will be hard to maintain—they've had a significant loss of population; they're shrinking at a time when their oil reserves are growing," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It's very important that [Russia remains] stable. It affects America greatly."

To make the giant leap from emerging economy to global powerhouse, analysts say, Russia must transform itself from a wellspring of energy, wood and metals to a country that produces as well as exports—and makes human capital its most valuable resource. Nowhere in Russia is that task more urgent than in Siberia, an expanse of rugged beauty and economic ruin. Siberia's southern neighbor, China, ravenously consumes Russian oil and timber, sending some of it back to Russia as finished goods. That lopsided conduit benefits China far more than Russia, experts say, and only deepens Siberia's plight. "Without a sustainable economy in the country's eastern half," says Dmitri Trenin, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "I see Russia becoming a junior partner to China."

While Putin has done little to remedy eastern Russia's economic woes in his eight years in office, he didn't create them. Nor did his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, though his chaotic stewardship made life measurably worse in this region. Today's eastern Russia hobbles because of decisions made decades ago, by Soviet planners who built cities in places where no one would choose to live. Siberia's winters are the world's harshest. More than 2,600 miles from Moscow, Irkutsk's population of 593,000 shivers through Januaries that average 11 degrees below zero at night. Remoteness also made Siberia a poor choice for city-building. Everything in Russia—power, money, commerce—loops back to Moscow. But Khabarovsk is an eight-hour flight from Moscow, or an eight-day train ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. A flight from Moscow to Vladivostok, Russia's largest Pacific port, takes nine hours. But neither climate nor distance weighed heavily in Josef Stalin's vision. Tapping Siberia's bonanza of gold, oil, nickel and timber required cities, Stalin's planners believed, and so Soviet leaders forcibly settled workers there.

Like other Siberian cities, Amursk was made to order. Soviet leaders wanted a cluster of defense-industry factories built by a bend in the Amur River, and in 1958 they dispatched laborers and bulldozers to build Amursk's plants, beige-brick apartment buildings and tree-lined boulevards. As a cog in the Soviet Union's centralized economy, Amursk flourished. Its pulp-processing plant made more cardboard than any other Soviet factory. Its timber mill sent particleboard to Japan, Australia and the U.S. Amursk's birthrate exceeded the Soviet average, as did its per capita weddings. Then, in the late 1980s, a plunge in oil prices broadsided the Soviet economy. With the end of the Cold War, orders for Amursk's munitions factories ceased. Moscow told the plants to convert for civilian use but did nothing to make that happen.

Much of the town's youth fled. Everyone else found themselves trapped in a city without work. Today many survive on government aid or the pensions of parents and grandparents.

'We get only words'

Leonard Bolotnikov, a retired pulp factory worker with a round, ruddy face and snow-white hair, says that after he pays rent and utilities, his monthly pension leaves him $19.53. Steeling himself against a bracing wind on an icy winter morning, he jabs his finger at the abandoned, ransacked buildings that line Mir Avenue. "We get only words and more words from our leaders," says Bolotnikov, 66, his face flushed with anger. "Look at these buildings. Everything is destroyed. Young people are leaving. My heart bleeds when I look at this."

The Soviet collapse ravaged all of Russia, but the toll was especially harsh on what Russians call grado-obrazuyushy, cities built around a single factory. In Biryusinsk in east Siberia, a solvents manufacturer buoyed the lives of 12,000 Russians during the Soviet era. The plant in turn was tethered to a cluster of sawmills that processed larch and pine and supplied the plant with sawdust, its primary raw material. "We could buy fur coats back then," says Olga Loginova, 47, a fermentation room worker.

In the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s, hundreds of sawmills went bankrupt, including the Biryusinsk plant's suppliers. The factory had to pay more for sawdust from mills farther away. By 2005, at a time when Moscow wealth was pushing up downtown real estate prices to nearly $1,000 per square foot, Biryusinsk plant workers were jamming into the factory's grocery to receive management's substitute for a paycheck: loaves of bread. "It was like during World War II, when people stood in line for hours to get a little bread," Loginova said. "We lived on this bread and on our vegetable gardens." In December 2005, the plant stopped production. Much of the town's youth has fled; older Russians here scrape by on $125 monthly pensions. Their adult children live off those same pensions. "We are no longer wanted here," says Anatoly Chubukov, a former truck driver who helped build railroads in east Siberia. Now he nets fish for food and thaws snow for drinking water. "We built the village and the road, the trains run—so now we are throwaways."

Eager for a turnaround

Russian leaders are scrambling for ways to lure money and people back to Siberia, to make it a land of promise rather than a land of exile. In Irkutsk, bureaucrats have convinced themselves that building a "super city" will turn the tide. They believe that the provincial capital and two smaller satellite cities, Angarsk and Shelekhov, can be linked to form a megalopolis with a million people and a magnet for jobs, people and investors.

Sergei Voronov, Irkutsk's deputy provincial governor, lays out the blueprints: two new highways, 24 hotels, three ski resorts, a new airport and the timeworn cure-all of urban planners around the world, a monorail. "It's impossible to utilize our natural resources without a labor force," Voronov says. "Our purpose is to create a prestigious place to live in so that this notion of Siberia being a place of exile is not the perception people have. The idea behind this supercity is to use whatever economic leverage we have to improve the image of this place."

Russian leaders also have dusted off a century-old pipe dream to build a $65 billion, 68-mile highway and rail tunnel underneath the Bering Strait between Russia's Chukotka Peninsula and Alaska. Neither the Kremlin nor Washington has given any hint of backing the idea, but Viktor Razbegin, an official at the Russian Economic Development and Trade Ministry, has called the tunnel "one of the few projects that can dramatically change the development of the Far East." That kind of reliance on forced, oversize answers to Siberia's economic and demographic woes mirrors the Soviet policymaking that led to eastern Russia's plight in the first place. The cure lies not in building more glass and steel, experts say, but in investing in Siberia's human capital—improving health care, tackling rampant alcoholism, seeding the growth of small businesses.

"I've got a secret for the Kremlin: In the modern world, the wealth of nations isn't in the ground, but in the people walking the ground," says Nicholas Eberstadt, an expert in demography and economics at the American Enterprise Institute. "The strategy of abandoning human resources for the sake of natural resources is one that will, in the long run, end in tears."

Bloomburg exposes Vladimir Putin's Potemkin military:

Russia's military, which once defined its power and is central to President Vladimir Putin's ambitions for global influence, is lagging behind its energy- driven economic boom. The nation's armed forces remain beset by manpower and morale problems, aging equipment, graft and unfulfilled promises to overhaul their Cold War-era structure, Western and Russian analysts say. While Putin, 55, has increased Russia's defense budget to a level four times greater than when he became president in 2000, it is still less than 6 percent of U.S. spending.

"There is this notion in the West that the Russian army is coming back,'' said Zoltan Barany, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who published a book this year about the decline of the Russian military. "They're not back. Things have started to change, but there's a long way to go before they're back, and I don't think they will ever be back like they were.''

A report last month by Moscow's Institute for National Strategy and two other independent research groups underscored the lack of progress. It said defense spending during Putin's tenure had grown only 15 percent after inflation from the 1990s, and that Russia has bought fewer weapons under him because of a ``dramatic rise in corruption.''

Outdated Fears

The analysts said military doctrine was still based on outdated fears of war with the West instead of more realistic threats from China or Islamic terrorists. Russian and Western news media "are inflating the myth of an active remilitarization of modern Russia,'' the analysts said. "This myth bears no relation to reality.'' [LR: Putin obviously wants to cause us to drop our guard long enough for him to become a real military threat. So he has two options: (a) create a Potemkin military and try to intimidate us into taking no action, or (b) let it be known how weak he really is, maybe even cause things to look worse than they are, and then argue that if he is weak no action is needed. As is so often the case in Russian la-la land, it seems that no one policy has been chosen and the right hand has chosen (a) while the left is attempting (b). Meanwhile, what we must understand is that it makes no difference. If Russia is weak, then now is the time to act to prevent it from getting strong. If it is strong, then now is the time to at before the actual blows start falling. It's clear that we haven't got as much to fear from Russian military action as we might think, just as was the case when the Iraqi army easily capitulated, surprising all. He who hesitates is lost. If we do not take action now, we will be forced to take it later at much greater cost.]

The gap between Putin's ambitions and his capabilities was evident in August, when he said that regular strategic-bomber flights would resume after a 15-year hiatus. The announcement revived memories of Cold War days, when Soviet and U.S. nuclear- armed bombers patrolled on hair-trigger alert. The reality turned out to be far different. The new patrols are done mostly by aging Tu-95 "Bear'' bombers that have turbo- prop rather than jet engines, carry no nuclear weapons and are limited to about one flight a week by budget and equipment constraints, according to Pavel Baev, a military analyst at Oslo's International Peace Research Institute.

A Shrinking Fleet

The resource crunch affects all military branches, analysts say. The Russian Navy now has one active-duty aircraft carrier -- the U.S. has 12 -- and its fleet of strategic nuclear submarines is shrinking as vessels wear out and aren't replaced. The most modern sub, the 11-year-old Yuri Dolgoruky, was designed as a platform for the Bulava-M long-range nuclear missile. The Bulava failed several tests, raising questions about its future and the sub's utility, Baev said. While Russian defense industries produce some good-quality equipment, especially fighter planes and surface-to-air missiles, most is sold abroad, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Virginia-based military research group. "They're basically playing with the same set of toys that Gorbachev gave them,'' Pike said, referring to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader.

Russia still fields a formidable nuclear arsenal, with 4,237 warheads deployed on 875 missiles and bombers as of July, according to data compiled by the Arms Control Association, a Washington research group. Only the U.S., with 5,914 warheads on 1,225 missiles and bombers, has more.

Repairs Required

Still, 60 percent of Russian missiles have exceeded their service life and half require major repairs, according to a 2005 Defense Ministry report, Barany said. Just 30 percent of the country's fighter planes are combat-ready, he said. The Moscow researchers said that if present trends continue, attrition will reduce Russia's intercontinental missile arsenal to between 100 and 200 in a decade. Russia's Defense Ministry didn't respond to written questions about the military's capability. The head of the Russian Strategic Missile Troops, Colonel- General Nikolai Solovtsov, was quoted by the official Itar-Tass news agency Dec. 17 as saying that Russia would be "compelled'' to maintain the strength of its nuclear arsenal because of U.S. plans to base a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe. Manpower problems remain acute, although some -- such as chronic late payment of officers' salaries -- have been eased by the budget increases.

Russia's Spending

Aided by a 255 percent surge in oil prices during Putin's eight years in office, Russia's 2007 defense spending was about 821 billion rubles ($33.6 billion), about 15 percent of total government expenditures, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. U.S. military spending in 2007 was about $582 billion, or 21 percent of the total federal budget, the institute said. Russia also suffers from endemic draft avoidance, with as many as nine out of 10 of those in the eligible 18-to-26 age group escaping service. "If you've got 90 percent draft evasion, those who show up are just too stupid to evade it,'' Pike said. "Imagine what kind of military you can put together with that.'' Military officials are seeking to make compliance more common by eliminating some deferments and gradually reducing draftees' terms to one year from two. Meanwhile, they have created all-volunteer units and stationed them in the volatile northern Caucasus, Baev said. "That's why Georgia has reason to be worried,'' he said.

Vested Interest

Russian political leaders have long talked of shifting to a smaller, more professional all-contract military. They have made little progress, partly because of opposition from generals who have a vested interest in blocking the change, analysts say. The generals exploit draftees by using them to do personal work or renting them out as cheap labor to enterprises, with the generals pocketing the fees, said William Hill, a professor at the U.S. National War College in Washington. The military pressures draftees to sign long-term service contracts, according to the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, a Moscow-based group that works to expose abuses in the military. The pressure includes sleep deprivation, beatings and threats of transfer to combat zones. Hazing persists even after high-profile cases generated official promises to curb abuses, Baev said. "Soldiers are mistreated in every possible way,'' he said. "That's why it's so difficult for this army to shift into contract service. You have to treat soldiers differently if they are professionals. Many of the officers aren't prepared to do this.''

Writing for Project Syndicate, Dominique Moisi (pictured, left), a founder and Senior Advisor at Ifri (French Institute for International Relations) and currently a Professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw, exposes the charade that is modern Russia:

Russia is literally buying its way back into the international system as a preeminent actor, one that is regaining power and clout by replacing nuclear weapons with oil and gas and substituting greed for fear. The balance of terror of the Soviet era has given way to unilateral energy dependency in favor of Russia. With their enormous cash flow, Russian billionaires are buying sumptuous properties all over the world, and Russia is buying prominent Germans like the former Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, if not the support of Germany as such.

Whatever the enormous differences that may separate them, post-communist Russia and fundamentalist Iran have much in common. Energy wealth gives them a sense of unique opportunity, the conviction that time is playing in their favor, and that they can now redress the humiliations they have suffered from the outside world. It is as if they were combining the Arab/Islamic world’s culture of humiliation and Asia’s culture of hope. Both are marked by a defiant nationalism, and both feel irresistible, all the more so because they sense that the United States is in decline as a result of the quagmire in Iraq, if not in Afghanistan as well.

Of course, the differences between Russia and Iran are enormous. The Iranian regime is highly ideological and animated by an open passion to destroy Israel. It does not enjoy the massive backing of its society, except when it comes to national pride and the quest for nuclear status.

Russia’s regime, by contrast, is animated by money, not ideology. In its quest to rebuild Russia’s geopolitical power and influence, Presdient Vladimir Putin has the support of the immense majority of the population. His motto, “Get rich and keep quiet,” sounds like Guizot’s priorities in mid-nineteenth century France, even if it is “seasoned” with a strong touch of imperial pride. As long as the oil money keeps flowing, most Russians will express no nostalgia for the democratic opening of the Yeltsin years, with its accompanying combination of chaos, corruption, international weakness, and disrespect for the state.

Are Russians so different from us in the western democratic world, or is democracy a luxury that only old, stable, prosperous, and satisfied societies can afford? In their quest for post-Soviet stability, Russians seem to have found reassurance in Putin. He does not match Peter the Great in physical stature, but he has proven to be a gifted politician, capable of grasping, then controlling, the mood of the Russian people.

For a majority of Russian citizens, economic prosperity and televised entertainment have become the modern equivalent of the panem et circenses formula of Roman times. The war in Chechnya may contribute to the moral corruption of Russia as a whole, to its frightening descent into a culture of violence. But it is also feeding a patriotic emotion – a popular longing for the restoration of Russia’s imperial status and prestige – that Putin’s regime has shrewdly exploited.

Meanwhile, ordinary Russians have gained little. The multiplication of assassinations of political opponents and economic rivals, the mafia practice of contract murders, cannot be seen as signs of a regained stability. Nor can the Putin regime’s manipulation of popular xenophobia against citizens of the former Soviet empire, such as Georgians.

Russia may have recovered its status as a strong power, but is it a respected, or even a happy one? Russia is rich, but Russians, at least most of them, remain poor, with a life expectancy that is closer to Africa than to Western Europe. Eventually, they will have to recognize that modern nations cannot live by power alone.