The tsars come Out: a gloomy prognosis for Russian freedom.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Column

AT THE MORNING sessions of the American Enterprise Institute's October 14 conference "Russia: Today, Tomorrow, and in 2008," the room of about 120 seats was filled almost to capacity. The speakers, pleasantly surprised, saw the turnout as a rebuke to the notion that Americans are suffering "Russia fatigue."

They may have been too optimistic: Judging from the conversations I heard during the lunch break, a good half of the audience was made up of Russians. Russia is certainly not on the front burner of American foreign policy concerns right now--a conference on the future of Iraq held at AEI a few days earlier was fully booked days in advance.

AEI President Christopher DeMuth opened the session by saying that Russia today is at a crossroads. He added that Russia is always at a crossroads. Some crossroads, of course, are more dangerous and more depressing than others. A decade ago, Russia seemed to be traveling a bumpy road toward a liberal society. Today, the general consensus is that it's slouching toward some variety of authoritarianism.

Perhaps the starkest assessment of the situation came from a speaker who wasn't there: Irina Khakamada, a member of the Russian Duma and the head of the liberal party Our Choice. She was scheduled to deliver the luncheon speech, but flu forced her to cancel at the last minute; instead, AEI distributed written copies of her talk, titled "Russia: Authoritarian Reality and Prospects for Democracy." It described the dominant political tendency in Russia today as "post-Soviet restoration," marked by the centralization of authority, the destruction of any meaningful political competition, a return to the role of the media as an instrument of the state, and a retreat from rapprochement with the West.

In Khakamada's view, Russia has already seen the restoration of a regime in which "the state means everything and civil society means nothing." Her forecast for 2008 was more gloom: most likely, another authoritarian leader to succeed Putin. She also warned that the next elections "will become the point of no return" after which "the regime could not be changed but only destroyed" and she pointedly reminded "Western democrats" that the collapse of democracy in Russia was unlikely to be preceded by the decay of its nuclear weapons.

Even without Khakamada's speech, the tenor of the conference leaned heavily toward pessimism--particularly during the morning session, which had three Russian speakers and dealt with...