Over the weekend Owen Matthews published a preemptive political obituary of President Dmitry Medvedev in Newsweek, pointing out that all of the problems that he has tried (and mostly failed) to confront in Russian society were specifically made by the hand of Vladimir Putin.  It's a pretty devastating and concise summary of the key issues.During his two terms in office, Russia's bureaucracy doubled in size, while according to Transparency International, the size of the "bribe economy" increased 10-fold. The bureaucracy became the business elite as the state--from the Kremlin to provincial governors and even local policemen--swallowed up private businesses. Today business rivals regularly use state power to put opponents in jail. They conjure up crippling tax raids and steal whole businesses with the connivance of local authorities. This makes it almost impossible for Russian businesses to compete internationally ...

In their latest piece for Newsweek, Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova do an excellent job explaining all the reasons why Russia has tumbled toward authoritarianism and confrontational foreign policy:  it serves the unending quest for respect.  By spending most of the article attempting to place the decisions of the Russian leadership in a rational context, as well as provide reasoning for why the citizens largely support and even celebrate the regime, Matthews and Nemtsova help to bridge the yawning gap of misunderstanding between the West and the complicated Russian mindset.  My only complaint might be that we should be careful not to view what we would call "Russia's self esteem paradox" as the sole determinant of what has happened

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An interesting column from Melik Kaylan at Forbes, who spends some time following Mikheil Saakashvili during last week's UNGA, and gets into a debate with Owen Matthews about Russia's ambitions and the legitimacy of their current grievances. The fundamental question of the debate: does a NATO presence in the Ukraine or Georgia really actually pose a security threat to Russia, or only a defense against expansionism? We had the McCain-Obama debate on. At the bohemian Greenwich Village brownstone of our friend Ann Marlowe, the leading literary salonista of our time, Misha ate and watched and greeted a stream of well-wishers. Upstairs, Owen and I debated the Russia/Georgia matter. He had just penned a quasi-sympathetic large profile of Misha in Newsweek. I had just published a story in The Wall Street Journal, the first to detail the destruction of Georgian cultural sites during the recent invasion. I have said before in ...