I hope you don’t mind that I make public these further comments, which you sent to me yesterday by email:

People like Kasparov are to be congratulated. It doesn’t sound as if The Other Russia even exists, to any extent, outside of Moscow. It’s pretty hard to wrap one’s mind around Russians’ cavalier relinquishment of their rights. I can understand it better than most Americans. Russians weren’t necessarily unhappy under the Soviet regime; everybody had food and medical care, and there weren’t any plutocrats rubbing everyone else’s face in the rather low level standard of living they all had. Then everyone had to suddenly work two and three jobs to keep up during the 1990s. Then there was a run on the banks in 1998. Now, one can buy anything one wants, wages are higher, the plutocrats are being reined in, and Putin throws Russia’s weight around in the world like in the good old days. It’s like the good old days, only better. One bad scenario, I suppose, is that we have to wait around for years until economics proves this prosperity had nothing to do with Putin, and in fact Putin set things in motion that will ultimately retard economic progress. People will figure this out, and a new wave of reform will happen. A better scenario would be if people took umbrage at Putin and his cronies taking over politics and business. Putin really is coming to seem an evil man.

There is an interesting assortment, in today’s paper, of responses posted by Russians to the Times piece. It’s here.

I tried to avoid personal references, but in writing this it occurred to me that I was in Moscow watching Yeltsin on t.v. as the clock clicked the New Year 1998-99 and I was in Berlin on January 4, 2006, when the Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis exposed the vulnerability of the EU — which didn’t substantially interfere with the Rosneft IPO between then and now. Those events bracket an era. It’s hard to believe political opposition to Putin is plausible any longer; more likely, Putin and his cronies will take their money and run just ahead of the Russian economy crumbling, and with today’s oil prices that remains for the future. Meanwhile, the gleaming Land Rover, Volvo, and IKEA sites on the outskirts of Moscow represent a startling change from that New Year just 10 years ago, and most Russians believe this is because of Putin, not in spite of him.