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What Russia wants: from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin, every new Russian president has drastically altered his county's relationship with the world. How will President Dmitry Medvedev change it again? Here are the clues that reveal what the Kremlin is thinking, and, more importantly, what it really wants.(Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin)
- Article from:
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Foreign Policy
- Article date:
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May 1, 2008
- Author:
- Krastev, Ivan
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Copyright informationCOPYRIGHT 2008 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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This much we know: In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has transformed itself from a one-party state into a one-pipeline state--a semiauthoritarian regime in democratic clothing. At the same time, Russia has grown increasingly independent and unpredictable on the international political scene. And now that Vladimir Putin has successfully installed his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, he is nowhere near relinquishing his grip on power. Putin's foreign policy is here to stay.
But there's so much we can't know about the direction Russia is heading. It is, at once, a regime that offers its citizens consumer rights ...