The last emperor: why Putin will rule Russia for the next quarter-century, and what does that mean for the West.

• Author: Aland, Kurt

The biggest misconception about Russians is their intellectual abilities. The stereotype of hill-less hillbillies, dirt-poor due to the lack of mental capacity has no basis. The conventional wisdom places top prizewinners in the most contested field of the human activity as: #1 Homer; #2 Shakespeare; #3 Dostoyevsky--ignoring the fact that the first two should be disqualified for steroid use. There is a hundred-year gap between "Iliad" and "Odyssey"; and how many men wrote Juliet's balcony scene is still a matter of debate.

Or so my acquaintance was told by one of his Moscow companions. The knowing people say that most escort-service employees can take care their nails, but with the Russian models you can actually talk about something, in some cases--even lose in blitz chess. Local youths regard poker prints as subjects for lesser minds.

If you still feel skeptical, look up and note that it wasn't a Chinese philosopher or Jewish mystic who said: "The genius should be a norm." It was a man called Tsiolkovsky. The Kremlinologists still wonder how against all odds, crises and purges, Russia continues to produce a scientific base that can master nuclear fission and interplanetary probes. Any of them will confirm that people who coined the definition "intelligentsia" are anything but stupid. But what is anything?

Most foreign commentators agree that with all those things Russians can do--they can't stand up to the authority. As my top guru James Kirkup summed it up: "A nation of sheep. Angry sheep, but nevertheless sheep, and in sheep's clothing." The Russian annotators don't try to disprove it. The greatest poet of that land, Alexander Pushkin, recapped its present and future with words: "Pasture away, O passive nation / That will not rise to honor's call. / What need have sheep of liberation? / The shears and blades befit you all ..."

If all those too-many-to-list opinions got to be fractions of some global scholarly conspiracy, its major mastermind should be Marquis de Custine, "the de Tocqueville of Russia." Visiting that country, he was shocked and outraged by locals' collaboration with their own oppression. His survey "La Russie en 1839" was banned there until the World Wide Web turned its content into the open-source data.

To understand why, we have to go back to the past, to the Russian state inception. After the city-state called "The Great Master of Itself" gave up its freedom (even though the Novgorod military outnumbered Moscow enforcers six to one), but before czarist pogroms transformed the economical capital of Northern Europe into a depopulated cowtown. The first ruler of United Russia was Czar Ivan IV, known to its population as "Grozny" (Thunderous/Luminous/Heavenly).

Foreign historians speculate how could such a title be rewarded to that coward, sadist and rapist (and somehow--the most educated and knowledgeable monarch of his time). Most of them overlook the importance of that historical figure. He set up the fundamental principle: the ruler of Russia is anointed by God and God himself (which makes more logical the current campaign for Czar Ivan's canonization). His forty-year war on his people set the standard for his less heavenly successors.

Only Josef Stalin, Grozny's fervent admirer, managed to live up to his "Teacher." The apt pupil restored the Oprichnina, an army of black-clad criminals allowed to act above the law. He even got his Sain-Bulat (figurehead) --comrade Kalinin, a former lackey who was made the Soviet titular head of state, "All-Union Headman." The stooge authorized all Stalin's policies, but couldn't even get his wife a separate Gulag cell. The Russian camp system became a thing of the past a long time ago, but "the creator of the modern Russia" still dominates his progeny. He is the one who established the highly centralized autocracy in that country. Grozny's "political revolution" completely altered the governmental structure of Russia and predetermined its history. (1)

In February of 1917, the last Ancien Regime of European civilization (with the scandal-plagued dynasty, weak-willed czar and terminally-ill heir) finally died a natural death. For months, the capital highbrows tried to involve the Russian subjects into Russian politics. And after the people failed to take the matter into their hands, somebody did it for them. In October, a group of international swindlers seized government buildings, dispersed the void parliament and declared themselves the supreme law on one-sixth of the land. They used three hundred thousand foreign mercenaries to enforce it. Most of the dirty job was done by Latvian guards, German shock troops, and Chinese torture and execution units--their medieval methods set up Lubyanka procedures.

Which brings us to the textbook on post-Romanov Russia: "The Gulag Archipelago." The writer asks the most important question on its first pages. "Why did nobody resist?" Why did completely innocent people (referred by A. I. Solzhenitsyn as "rabbits") arrive to prison gates with arrest notices? Why did combat-ready regiments march to their Solovki camps? There is a legend that during the Great Purge, one man deserved and greeted his arrest with a hail of bullets. It's only half-true. Isaac Babel did have an affair with the beautiful wife of the chief of Stalin's secret police (after she rejected her husband's employer), but gave in like everyone else. Let's skip what happened after his rehabilitation and fast-forward to the end of the Second Thaw, apartment bombings of 1999.

Watching that footage, I heard a Hamburg colleague mentioning that no civilians were hurt in Reichstagsbrand. This is when a colleague from Moscow told us an old Russian folktale about an emperor parading in clothes that only competent people can see ... Until a little boy cries out the emperor is naked and lands in an insane asylum, where in a half -comatose state he signs the confession that the emperor is fully clothed and enemies of the people paid him to report otherwise. "So," the fabler asked, "does it really matter that everyone, including the medics who beat and drug that boy, know that the emperor ain't wearing anything?" A long pause left that question unanswered and made me wondering: How every is everyone? Many commentators interpret the Moscow street scenes as oddball revolts of over-nourished metrosexuals. They say that bored glitterati like the Russian Paris Hilton don't represent that nation. They claim that Putin is a cult hero for the regular people of Russia, most...