``...The threat of tycoons returning to power, and the Yeltsin-era elite being restored - something which has weakened the first two years of Putin's presidency - is a very frightening prospect for the West. According to prior experience in Russia, oligarchy promotes growth of organized crime in all forms...
...However, the opposite political agenda - an authoritarian system, which is said to be the aim of former KGB officers - hardly seems any less dangerous for the West...
...Finally, there is some uncertainty about Russian liberals and the potential of liberalism in Russia. Expressions of loyalty to liberal ideas no longer guarantee a pardon from the West for charges of dishonesty and corruption...
...It is possible to ignore, agree with, or deny the West's expectations and fears about Russia. But we should understand that they are real for the Western public, and they significantly influence the West's policy toward Russia...'' (An Inevitable Win, What does the West expect of Russia, Valery Solovey, 4/26/2002)
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While the above has an acceptable sound, I think it is nonsense. The West, meaning the United States trust no power that it hasn't completely subsumed within its own market fundamentalism and made into just another night of the living dead corpus, a living exploitation scheme, that is a zombie commodity. The Dark Empire trusts nothing that can live outside its own all consuming embrace of death.
The sense of uncertainty emanating from US foreign policy channels towards Russian liberals and the potential of liberalism in Russia, is probably the sense that Russian liberalism has the potential to become something like that of what remains of EU socialism and the new wave of leftist anti-globalization movements and the restoration of meaningful and broad controls on neoliberal capitalism---cutting short its rampaging merchandising commodification of all that lives and breaths on the planet. All glimmers of such light and life, however dim, are naturally suspect.
Chuck Grimes