For the innocent, and there are many of us around the globe, studying Russia is like walking through a hall of fun house mirrors.
Nothing is as it appears and yet everything is as it appears, a contradiction in terms, of course, but perhaps that's why in 1939 Winston Churchill famously called it a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
In reality, however, it is more enigma than riddle, and hardly a mystery at all. It took slightly more than a decade to telegraph that the Soviet machine and President Vladimir Putin's organization represent a distinction without that oft-quoted difference.
If we -- we being the West -- can acknowledge this, and deal with it, we will all sleep a little easier. Harvard's Marshall Goldman, who perhaps has a better handle on this enigma than anyone, suggested 25-years ago that the country was a Potemkin Village.
I was in that long ago meeting, and Goldman was explaining this fact to my boss, the U.S. Senate Democratic Leader, just prior to our visiting Moscow to discuss the second stage of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet leadership.
Little has changed. Drive outside Moscow in any direction, and you visit a civilization that has huge pockets of third world characteristics. The country is propped up by its vast oil reserves, but the wealth is in the hands of a few.
Physically, it looks a little like America -- but the 1940's version.
It aspires, however, to a status it had during the Cold War when it was considered one of the world's two great powers. Its military complex made it so, for the great equalizer on the world stage is a substantial storehouse of nuclear weapons.
But Russia is not a democratic country. The region, including Ukraine, is far from democratic. It lacks a truly free press and fair elections, two of the most basic ingredients in the democratic formula. Without both, one is merely pretender to the cause.
Additionally, and perhaps most important, Russia is ruled by power politics, as it always has been, whether under the Tsars or the Communists or the current leadership. In the final analysis, the State is the most formidable institution.
These are facts of life. It's not going to change, and one can not wish it, negotiate it, cajole it or force it to be otherwise. It is historically and genetically incapable of choosing the path that America's forefathers took. It would be an unnatural occurrence.
For some reason, however, the West has an easier time practicing such realpolitik with China, while wanting to reform the former Soviet Union, even though there is nothing in the political playbook that would suggest this is possible in the long run.
China is really the riddle and the mystery to the West. It didn't open up until Vice Premier Deng came to power in the late 1970s, and then only slightly.
The West went eyeball to eyeball with the Soviets, but merely squinted at the exotic Far East.
China kept its population under yoke, and the first George Bush virtually turned his head to the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square. On the other hand, the Soviet Union collapsed, and herein lies all the difference when it comes to how each nation is viewed in the West.
I came to the region believing I could be part of a great reformmovement in the former Soviet Union. On many levels, I believe the USAID organization with which I was contracted, did some good, if only at a lowest common denominator.
However, when it came to various privatization schemes dreamed up by various international funding organizations and foisted on the government, I have questioned the wisdom of a mechanism that, though well intentioned, eventually put vast wealth in the hands of a few.
Unlike many in the West, I do not shed tears for former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned oligarch. I do not believe he had the capacity, birth right or goodstanding — as a few suggested — to be America's next best friend from the region.
Our new best friend -- at arms length -- is President Putin and the people in power in Russia. We need presently to deal with what is, not what we wish something to be.
Otherwise, we are spending too much time in the hall of mirrors.
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