Andie N. says Russian society is not just authoritarian, but kleptocratic (and therefore doomed to subordination to the West).
But 'kleptocratic' needs unpacking. On the one hand that appeals to the discourse which paints the Oligarchs as thieves raiding the workers' nationalised property. I had not understood the Andie held such illusions in nationalised property in the USSR. Also, Putin's government appeals to a similar idea in its current campaign against the excesses of the Oligarchs, claiming to defend Russian wealth against the 'kleptocratic' Oligarchs. Surely Putin ought to enjoy your support on that basis.
On the other hand, 'kleptocratic' could refer to the state seizure of private assets, as in the nationalisation of part of Yukos (and the jailing of Khordokhovsky). It is an argument that is put by the exile Oligarchs, like Berezovsky, and their supporters in the Wall Street Journal. But that is an argument that sees private industry as the apex of freedom and resists public ownership, rather as the British Parliament rang with allegations that Gamal Abdel Nasser was 'Ali Baba with his forty thieves' when the Suez Canal was nationalised.
Perry Anderson, in his London Review of Books article dodges between the two interpretations, borrowing examples from the proponents of private industry in its struggle against Putin, but at the same time seeking to damn Putin as a tool of Oligarchical interests.
An die on the problem that Russians do not seem to believe they are oppressed:
"If the oppressed are cool with their subordination, all is OK, "
Well, you have to admit it is a problem. Are you going to make their freedom into an insight that you hold but is outside of their experience, re-presented to them, as it were, as an ideal before which they must kneel? I think Marx's answer to the problem was that there was a contradiction within society the emergent side to which he gave expression. In Karl Korsch's terms, Marx appealed to the reality of revolution (i.e. class struggle, which was a fact of capitalist societies, let's say between 1815 and 1989, not an ideal that he had imposed upon them). Can we say that there is a contradiction in Russian society, where the new society is pregnant with the old?