Speaking as somebody who lives in Russia -- most people in Russia think the government is not authoritarian enough. It's the main complaint.
Having "authoritarian" as a criterion for goodness/badness is silly anyway. What matters is how the people in the country are doing, which is generally tied into how effective the government is at solving problems, not to its form.
--- On Mon, 6/15/09, Itamar Shtull-Trauring <itamar at itamarst.org> wrote:
>
> Completely changing the subject: People say that a lot, and
> it's
> annoyingly inaccurate. By the time Hitler had come to power
> the
> conservatives were well on their way to gutting the Weimar
> democratic
> system via emergency powers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preu%C3%
> 9Fenschlag , although I can't vouch for the article's
> accuracy). And he
> came to power in large part because the conservatives
> thought they could
> use him as an anti-democratic force.
>
> The history is worth remembering, among other reasons,
> because Russia is
> in many ways similar to Weimar Germany: an insecure former
> empire whose
> fall is blamed on others, and a democracy fatally
> undermined by leaving
> in place military and government bureaucracies that still
> looked back to
> the authoritarian past. Russia did have the looting and
> resulting
> oligarchs for a while, but the authoritarian state is now
> firmly back on
> top.
>
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