As if to provide a useful metaphor for Russian politics, Vladimir Putin recently emerged from the Black Sea, in a scuba suit, carrying two ancient Greek vases. “The boys and I found them,” the vacationing Prime Minister, and former President, said of these treasures from the birthplace of democracy.

On Thursday, his spokesman admitted what everyone already knew: They were planted. “Look, Putin did not find an amphora that had been lying on the bottom for many thousands of years.. Of course, they were left there or placed there,” he said. “It’s completely normal.”

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Indeed, it is completely normal in Russia nowadays. A few days earlier, Mr. Putin made that abundantly clear with a much-heralded speech he delivered at Moscow’s Luzhniki Sports Palace.

You might have assumed, given the democratic revolutions across the Arab world, that Mr. Putin would use the occasion to exemplify Russia as a model of post-authoritarian democratic success. After all, the month of his speech marked the twentieth anniversary of the vote by the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies to disband the Soviet Union, a move that liberated 15 countries from seven decades of authoritarianism.

Instead, Mr. Putin decided to tell the world that Dimitri Medvedev, the Russian president since 2008, is a Greek vase.

Mr. Medvedev, who was elected to the Russian presidency after Mr. Putin finished his legal maximum of two consecutive terms, told the crowd that he would be stepping down as president next year so that Mr. Putin could run for the position – – and therefore win a third and probably a fourth term of office. Not only that, but it had all been part of a carefully calculated plot, a move to create the illusion of democratic competition in a country devoid of it. Mr. Medvedev had been planted at the bottom of the sea.

“I want to say directly: an agreement over what to do in the future was reached between us several years ago,” Mr Putin boasted to the crowd. Mr. Medvedev, who had spent much of his term appearing to distance himself from the former KGB chief and seemingly preparing himself to run against him as a more liberal alternative, admitted that he had been an eager participant: “We actually discussed this variant of events while we were first forming our comradely alliance.”

So Mr. Putin’s speech did end up providing an important lesson for the democratic revolutionaries of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. It showed what can happen when the former elites of a dictatorship become the self-appointed saviours of a country from the errors of its earlier democratic reformers.

Mr. Putin can get away with this presidential bait-and-switch – – he calls it “managed democracy” – – because he can claim that the alternative is the terrible chaos of the unregulated, laissez-faire 1990s, just as Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi were able to claim that the only alternative was Islamic extremism. And indeed, if their democratic successors aren’t careful to build strong institutions, a thriving market economy and a pathway into the middle class, they could find themselves in this position within the decade.

But this is far from an inevitable fate – – or an essential part of the Russian or Slavic character, as mythology holds. Democratic revolutionaries need only look next door to Estonia, which joined the euro this year and has led the efforts to support Greece’s recovery, or to fellow European Union member Poland, which is having a lively and wide-open parliamentary election this weekend and is the only European country to have dodged the financial crisis, or to the Czech Republic, Georgia or Slovenia, all of them stable democracies.

Mr. Putin, already speaking in presidential mode this week, has called for the creation of a “Eurasian Union,” joining Belarus, Kazakhstan and other neighbours in an autocratic bloc to rival to the democratic EU. It has led some to compare it, rather inaccurately, to the USSR (which Mr. Putin often lionizes these days).

But it means Mr. Putin is now actively courting Ukraine, whose president Viktor Yanukovych is teetering between west and east. He has made important moves toward joining the EU and putting aside old barriers, but he stands on the verge of imprisoning former president Yulia Tymoshenko in a transparently political trial. His decision in that trial could tip the balance of the entire region.

This is not a return to Soviet times. Mr. Putin’s Potemkin-village politics have infuriated several of his top ministers to flee his party to join a new democratic politics. There is a burgeoning new middle class, with no ties to the old elite, who have no interest in the easy security provided by Mr. Putin.

Democratic revolutions do indeed work. But Russia’s did not take place in 1991; it lies ahead.