Americans need to avoid viewing Russians in the manner pithily expressed by the British after World War II about Germans, "They're either at your throat or at your feet." Russia's former threatening Soviet military strength and present debilitating weaknesses are severely limited prisms for Americans to view the world's largest country through.

For example, on the Democratic side, many foreign policy hands remain concerned about Russia, in the context of their overall eurocentric focus - but they seem insensitive to the bad taste lingering in Russian mouths from the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. These foreign policy pundits argued that Putin declared Bush his choice last fall due to oil politics and the Administration's alleged soft-peddling criticism of Russia on human rights. Certainly Putin would not endorse Bush based on a lingering dislike of the Democrats, dating from the Clinton Administration's excessive faith in Boris Yeltsin as a reformer? The failure of NATO peacekeepers to prevent revenge attacks and desecrations of Orthodox Christian sites by ethnic Albanians since the Kosovo war has added insult to injury in Russian eyes, especially since such attacks are scarcely covered in the Western media.

An article in RIA Novosti today echoes Russian distaste for the humiliating and corrupt Yeltsin years, and the lingering distrust of Western academics and experts who often hailed the "privatization" and "reforms" of that era. RIA Novosti singles out the Swedish academic Anders Aslund for rebuttal, because he works for the influential American funded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Aslund had argued that Putin would not only fail to amend the Constitution allowing for him to serve another term - or failing that, designate an heir apparent. Aslund also claimed that Russia, like Ukraine, is ripe for peaceful democratic revolution and that Putin would be tossed before 2008.

Using the subtitles from his paper and contents therein, many of Aslund’s assertions are either exaggerations and/or part of a political agenda that has more to do with American foreign policy goals than with Russia's continued political and economic evolution. Aslund is also incorrect to romanticize Russia's "democratic achievements" while Boris Yeltsin was president and errors when claiming Putin's tenure has created a new regime type. Both approaches minimize many of the continuities with the Yeltsin era.

Aslund is certainly correct when pointing out Putin's successes during his first term: economic growth, market-friendly reforms, introduction of a 13% flat tax on personal income, modernization of the tax and legal codes, and balanced foreign policy [read: Putin's reapproachment with the U.S. since 9/11 - CDG]. Russia watchers, for the most part, universally accept this rendition of Putin's first four years in office. However, according to Aslund, there are "blemishes." He cites the "ruthless war in Chechnya," without mentioning that the second war in Chechnya was a reaction to the second time Dagestan had been invaded by Chechen terrorists. No responsible Russian leader would have allowed that to stand.

RIA Novosti's editors also make a sarcastic reference to the U.S. Congress' panicky reaction to Chinese state-owned CNOC's bid to buy Unocal. This in contrast to Russia's relative openness to at least partial Chinese bids for ownership of Russian energy assets. The message is plain, "Get the beam out of your own eye, America."

Back to American partisan politics and Russia - a repproachment with Russia after 9/11, after Chechen terrorists openly allied themselves with Al-Qaeda, would have happened whether Bush or Gore had won in 2000. For Republicans, prodded by their critics' charges of hypocrisy in the Administration's democracy promotion agenda, the temptation will be to hector rather than invest. Russian entrepreneurs want Western capital and free trading access to Western markets - not more advice from Western consultants.

Russians see what's happening in China and want stability and prosperity more than they want lectures about human rights . This is not to say that independent media and judiciaries can be discounted in the slightest - as China will discover after its first major bank or corporate implosion, in the long term these are indispensable to prosperity. It's just that right now, Americans need to acknowledge that Russians fear miserable poverty and national decline more than authoritarianism. Like Sub-Saharan Africa, Russians have had "democracy" and "elections", but not the rule of law and widespread prosperity.

Russia is at a strategic crossroads. Russia can either move towards the failed Venezuelan, Saudi, and Nigerian models, with "the Devil's excrement" leading to corruption and stagnation, or towards a U.K./North Sea model, where oil is a pillar but not the sole basis for the economy. Crushing terrorism and organized crime, and establishing the rule of law consistently, have to be the top priorities if Russia is to right its course.