One of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook is the subtle theft of the people's sovereignty, grafting the rights of citizens onto a regime of personal power. Cuba's Fidel Castro was and is the grandmaster of this tactic - firmly uniting himself, his name, his family, and his Revolution, and the country.  If you go against Fidel, this means you are going against the Revolution and against the national interests.  It's all inseparable, you see?  There's no shortage of contemporary examples, ranging from the rhetorical artistry of Hugo Chavez to the skillful disaggregation of African opposition by Robert Mugabe.

It's the same in Russia.  Whenever someone criticizes Vladimir Putin, the party, the siloviki, or government policy, this individual is instantly cast as a deranged "anti-Russian" whose hate

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Just when I thought I was all done posting video interviews from my last trip to Washington, I saw Bob's post today about the Gary Hart and Dmitri Simes article about realism, interests, and the prospects for cooperation between the Obama Administration and Russia.  In response, I have gathered together some of the last scraps of the interview I shot with David Satter from the cutting room floor, as his comments strangely seem to engage almost in a direct dialogue with the Hart and Simes piece, especially in terms of debating realism (though the interview occured a month before this article was published).  Some of my questions to Satter stemmed from an article he published in Forbes in November 2008 containing advice for Obama on Russia, including the point to "ignore the realists."  Taken together, the video ...

Dmitri Simes, who usually only says very positive things about Russian authoritarianism under Putin, tells the Financial Times that during the war in Georgia there were numerous cases of military officers exceeding their mandate and acting beyond the reach of public accountability. Internally in Russia, this is a daily experience with anyone who has happened to deal with a disagreement with anyone in the security or justice apparatus. The result is an almost intractable situation on the ground in Georgia, with Russian troops ensconced in a huge swathe of the country’s territory, outside the disputed enclaves which they ostensibly entered to save from Georgian attack. (...) “You have two people who are in charge, one who has full constitutional legitimacy, another has a lot of practical authority, and it would be strange indeed if it did not create an area of ambiguity about who tells who what village ...