Soviet Reunion.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Civil rights and economic development under Russia's President Vladimir Putin

Russia's future is looking frighteningly like its past.

When I left Moscow as a teenager in 1980, the Soviet regime seemed eternal--virtually impervious to internal change or external defeat, at best containable in its imperial ambitions. When the changes then known under the blanket term glasnost began toward the end of the '80s, my first reaction was that all the talk of reform and openness was just a cosmetic gloss for Western consumption. However, a few years and five trips to my former homeland later, I was inclined toward a new conviction: Whatever happened in Russia, good or bad, there was no going back to the old days of the Cold War, enforced ideological conformity, a docile press, and pervasive fear of the powers that be.

In recent months, though, I have occasionally wondered if, having once overestimated the permanence of the Soviet system, I had more recently overestimated the permanence of change. The news from post-Soviet Russia, never particularly heartening, increasingly evokes grim and queasy feelings of deja vu.

Consider these disturbing data points: An American student is arrested for alleged drug possession, then hit with espionage charges that are never formally pursued but hang over him nonetheless. Employees at scientific institutes and laboratories are ordered to keep the Russian Academy of Sciences informed of all their foreign contacts; they must now provide copies of applications for international grants and of articles submitted to foreign publications, to disclose visits by foreigners, and to file written reports on business trips abroad. All of this is ostensibly to prevent the leakage of classified information.

Broadcast media outlets critical of the government become targets of transparently political investigations and takeovers. The pro-government press bristles with anti-Americanism while the country's leadership cozies up to communist China, Cuba, and the pariah state of North Korea. Izvestia columnist Yuri Bogomolov noted sarcastically that "Russia was slightly made up to look like the U.S.S.R." for the recent visit by North Korea's Kim Jong II, though not to the extent of filling the streets with joyous throngs to greet him.

The regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin's predecessor, the erratic Boris Yeltsin, certainly had numerous faults. Rapacious corruption was, perhaps, the least egregious of them. Under Yeltsin, steps toward a market economy based on private property and competition were minimal...