shaking up the domestic political scene to make sure it will not slump into apathy when he himself passes the torch? And if things go wrong, is this Russia’s very own White Revolution, long feared by the Russian elite, and long coveted by Western intriguers?

Russian politics has always confounded Western observers, and continues to do so. Putin is famously imperious and gets away with it. He taunted the opposition by saying he thought the original demonstrations were part of an anti-AIDS campaign, that the white ribbons were condoms. But he nonetheless sanctioned the largest political opposition rallies in the past 20 years.

US democracy-promotion NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy — a key player in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution — are active in Russia’s opposition, but Putinauthoritarianism along the lines of post-war South Korea, Putin’s rule deepened corruption — the bane of late Soviet and early post-Soviet society. Instead of trading political freedom for effective governance, he clipped Russians’ civil and political rights without delivering on this vital promise. Neither did he end collusion between the state and the oligarchs. That was the handle that badboy Alexei Navalni used to catalyse the opposition around his slogan that United Russia is the “party of swindlers and thieves”.

This was the scene in the 2000s in Ukraine, where it was possible for the NEDers to undermine the much weaker Ukrainian state and install the Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko in 2004. However, instead of addressing the problems that led to the Orange Revolution, Putin focused on foreign threats