Power to the Powerful in Russia is Bad.

The confusion over Russia in a Guardian editorial today ( Power to the Powerful ) reflects a profound ignorance of Russian history and an utter lack of realism as well as bad faith, repellent double standards.

With regards this summer's destructive forest fires and the failure to provide a proper fire service, the Guardian cites the official who,

....said it was up to each owner to have their own fire bucket. Why should the state help those who could not, or would not, help themselves? The narod are mugs.

This is actually very much what some Russian liberals think of the Russian narod or the plebs in neighbouring Ukraine where on the election of Yanukovych in elections earlier this year Yulia Latynina opined in a Moscow Times article that "Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous".

When Hurricane Katrina hit the USA, Western liberals did not suggest that regime change should be imposed or that EU nations should preach to the USA about its democratic deficits. Nor that the failure of the neoliberal economic model to guarantee security to its citizens was a major failure and that the EU should call for the funding of civil society activists to challenge the monied oligarchies that control the US.

This is not to say that deficiencies in "the West" mean that continued failures in Russia as regards should be simply excused because "we" are in no position to criticise. Yet a wider perspective is needed beyond the crude impulse to exploit humanitarian catastrophes to make one dimensional political swipes at Putin.

For a start by any standards Britain has become less of a participatory democracy in recent years and more of a "virtual" one that is staged and choreographed in a way that converges with the Russian model of a democracy mixed with authoritarianism. It is just that Britain's ailing civil society can provide real opposition to the oligarchy there.

In Russia there has not existed such a tradition that grew up in Britain over many centuries and the idea of "civil society" in the West is declining as states become more intent on circumventing it and ceding power to unaccountable transnational organisations such as the IMF and large corporations and media.

Indeed Britain has provided succour to the exiled Russian oligarchs that New Labour or New Conservative politicians have reflexively supported, despite their criminality, and have never condemned as explicitly as they have Putin who has never been forgiven for disproving the idea that Russia needed neoliberalism.

The crude belief that economic liberalism leads inexorably to political liberalism is rehashed in the Guardian and shows a curious economic determinism of the sort that certain Marxists would have approved of when it states,

God forbid that economic liberalisation should lead to political change, the creation of real political parties, a functioning civil society, and institutions independent of the governing elite. There is no exact equivalent in English of Putin's "soft autocracy", and that may be telling in itself. Even benign despotism implies a will to improve the lives of ordinary people.

There might be no exact equivalent in English for "soft autocracy" but to blame Russian for linguistic difficulties in articulating what Guardian "liberals" think is more a problem for them. Putin's hybrid of autocracy and democracy is intent on creating a powerful state that can create the conditions for Russian capitalism.

The very nature of Russia requires a degree of centralisation and the creation of a functioning state. Oppositionists in The Other Russia hold Putin to account for his authoritarianism and yet never state what they would do instead to curtail oligarch power and root out corruption.

The reason is that many Russian "liberals" still support the notion that the global "transition" from Communism to Liberalism was never completed and ignore the traumatic impact of shock therapy and the millions of Russians who died, as documented by an important Lancet study.

There was little concern for the Russia narod back in the 1990s when only the tradition of peasant cultivation and plots saved them from an actual famine and greater levels of death and starvation. This fact is airbrushed out of nearly everything that Guardian liberals such as Luke Harding write on Russia.

That corruption persists and the spoils of office still fall to FSB operatives is hardly a good thing but the experience of the 1990s and the realities of Russian politics bear out the fact that the "democratic" opposition is still financed by those wanting power and wealth they had under Yeltsin in the 1990s.

Putin's task has been first to consolidate the Russian state an impose what he calls "the dictatorship of law". It's a vision that Michael Stuermer argues, in Putin and the Rise of Russia, suggests owes much to Hegel's notion of a machtstaat and that is held to be needed in order to avoid the chaos and anarchy created by the policies of the IMF.

Before lecturing Russia on its deficiencies it is about high time many in the West admitted the culpability of policies that originated mostly in the USA-the Washington Consensus-in creating the mess that Putin is responding to and stopped naively buying into the messianic New Cold War guff spouted by neoliberal ideologues like Edward Lucas.

The problem, as evidenced by Russian nationalist responses, is that "Democratic Geopolitics" is seen as having those double standards inherent in the New Great Game for control of the pipeline matrix, of which Russia is still a central part in post-Soviet space, and is also evident in the Guardian's Milibandite propaganda trope here,

Russia itself is languishing. Its economy contracted by nearly 8% last year, its worst annual economic performance since 1994, and – despite being so dependent on the stuff – it is producing less oil now than the Soviet Union did in the 1970s.

Soviet oil accounted for 35% of global production in 1985. Oil from Russia accounts today for just 17% – a marked decline even after the partial loss of oil from the Caspian basin is factored in.

Russia's economy has shrunk twice in the last decade, and deindustrialisation is making itself felt in Russia's mono-cities – those reliant on a single industry. It is against this background that the billions of dollars thrown at baubles like Skolkovo and Sochi should be judged.

That oil production is declining is obvious enough globally, one reason that Miliband still supports the invasion of the oil grab that was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 just four years after North Sea Oil peaked back in 1999 and Blair and Bush saw Iraq as a panacea to guarantee Western hegemony.

The contraction of the Russian economy is serious but hardly on the scale of the previous decade i.e the 1990s, when shock therapy laid waste to whole swathes of Russian industry and that is conveniently omitted in the Guardian's shrill and one dimensional worldview, one consistently repeated in what can only be considered forthright propaganda.

The shrinking of the Russian economy back in 1998 was a result of the inappropriate nature of the IMF's neoliberal policies and one important reason why Putin was able to consolidate power after 1999 when NATO was extending its control over pipeline routes from the Black Sea through the Kosovo Conflict and Russia seen as weak and powerless.

The New Cold War mantra is hinted at by the way Russia's declining oil base is evidenced by contrasting it to the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, as if Russia under Putin was some seamless successor to the Soviet Union but a weaker version that Democratic Geopoliticians could still alter.

Yet the over dependency of the USA and UK, indeed the West as a whole, on oil lying in unstable lands riven with ethnic irredentism and conflicts is equally as evident. If Russia still did not control a large amount of oil and resources the West wants a stake in it would care less for Russia.

It could be argued that a mutually beneficial partnership between the West and Russia would be in the interests of both and can only be gained if Putin is removed in favour of a more "open" political system. Yet the evidence of the 1990s is hardly encouraging and political thinking in the West remains the same.

The Democratic Geopoliticians of The Other Russia are financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs who aim at "regime change", something that Putin can exploit to shore up popular support for Russian nationalism and which Other Russian ultra-nationalists such as Limanov's Natzbols are mobilised to challenge in the streets.

In such cynical conditions it is highly unlikely that pro-Western liberals are going to count for much in Russia as few of them have any regard for Russian interests beyond exploiting the deficiencies of Russia's record on freedom to advance their own designs to get their hands on Russia's resources.

Democracy was hardly encouraged when Yeltsin launched a coup d'etat against the Russian Parliament in 1993, invaded Chechnya and when the West had little or nothing to say about that, only becoming interested in human rights when Putin thumbed his nose at Western geopolitical interests.

Those ex-Soviet nation states that have joined the US geopolitical orbit, such as the Baltic Republics, have , moreover, suffered incredible poverty and de-industrialisation as a result of neoliberal "reforms" imposed by the IMF. The economy of Latvia declined by 15% after the 2008 crisis.

That is hardly a great advert for "joining the West" and both the EU and the US will just have to accept that Russia and a goodly number of Russians and Ukrainians are not going to be interested in sacrificing what meagre material benefits they have got since shock therapy was rejected.

Despite the folly of "the billions of dollars thrown at baubles like Skolkovo and Sochi" that "should be judged", the Russians can come back with the West's financial sectors profligate irresponsibility, massive debt fuelled consumerism in the UK and US, the billions squandered on Iraq.

Billions of pounds are squandered in London by the exiled oligarchs who robbed Russia in the 1990s, like Roman Abramovich snapping up Chelsea to make it his plaything. London alone generates most of the UK's income in a dysfunctional economy based on rentierism and money transactions alone.

The New Russian elite knows these weaknesses and it is hardly going to be lectured by those who colluded in the robbery of Russian assets in the 1990s to a tune of $300 billion.

Russia is simply not going to go along the road mapped out for it by the West, that Democratic Geopolitics often sacrifices democracy to coalitioning new oligarchic elites ( as in the Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" of 2004 ) . Russians will continue to prefer a strong leader who can keep those who want to sell out Russia's national interests to foreign ones.

The damage done in the 1990s will not be forgiven very quickly and events will move on further along the path towards large power blocks fighting to control oil and gas and trying to install elites to further these ends, something that will lead to a greater pathology of competing power interests that could become lethal.

With regards democracy, the perception of double standards on the part of the West and the fact that "liberals" in Russia seem more intent on pursuing their own interests in tandem with US help will be resented and, as a consequence, resisted. And that the West's mistakes ( and greed ) are to blame for that.