What about the so-called liberals? The so-called liberals had no popular support. Anatoly Chubais, one of the architects of the early '90s "reforms," was one of the most hated men in Russia (in 2005, a deranged former army officer would try to assassinate Chubais by setting off a roadside bomb and then unloading on his armored car from an automatic); Boris Nemtsov, briefly groomed by Yeltsin as his heir apparent, was more interested in maintaining a good tan in winter than vying for political office; and Grigory Yavlinsky, possibly the most principled of the major liberal politicians, was also the most passive, content with his steady 7 percent of the electorate.

Any viable candidate who emerged from the debacle of the 1990s, when Russian life expectancy plunged, its borders shrank to a size not seen since the early 18th century and it lost a war on its periphery to a scruffy, lightly armed group of freedom fighters—any viable politician would have had to reject the policies that led to these catastrophes in the strongest possible terms. All the viable candidates did so. The bet made by the Yeltsin inner circle was that Putin would be the least anti-liberal of the bunch—that is to say, they were betting on the existence of Nice Putin.

They turned out to be wrong. In his first few years, Putin looked like he could go either way. He was curt during his introduction to President Bill Clinton ("We're going to miss ol' Boris," Clinton supposedly remarked afterward to his chief Russia hand, Strobe Talbott) but cozied up to President George W. Bush, especially in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Nice Putin could not have acted any nicer than actual Putin on the day of the event, being the first leader to call the American president with his condolences and offer of support. He canceled military exercises that might have seemed unnecessarily aggressive to the bereaved Americans, and pressured his allies in Central Asia to open their airspace and real estate to U.S. military bases. The good times didn't last (especially when the Bush administration started pushing for a missile shield in Eastern Europe), but for a while you could imagine a Nice Putin, if you wanted to.

For many people, Putin went wrong when he ordered the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the oil giant Yukos, in fall 2003. But what would Nice Putin—some plausible alternative leader—have done? Last year, Thane Gustafson, of Georgetown University, published his magisterial Wheel of Fortune, a history of the post-Soviet oil business, which contains the most convincing and complete account yet of what exactly prompted Putin to act as he did against Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky had privatized not only Yukos (a giant oil conglomerate built up over decades by Soviet labor) but also important portions of the Duma. He had alienated many old Soviet oil men with his aggressive drilling practices. He had begun running what amounted to an independent foreign policy by negotiating directly with the Chinese for a new interstate pipeline.

Most important, from the state's perspective, Khodorkovsky had received his controlling stake of Yukos as a sort of trust; at a moment of tremendous weakness, the state had had to sell off its crown industrial jewels for a pittance. The insiders who bought them had become fabulously rich. From the state's perspective—and this would have been Nice Putin's perspective, too, had such a person existed—the insiders owed the government their loyalty.

Now, Nice Putin—a more nimble and far-seeing Russian leader of the time—would never have ordered the arrest of someone for political purposes. He would have tried to find a way to bring Khodorkovsky and his enormous oil company (at the time the biggest oil company in the second biggest oil producer in the world) into the fold. If Khodorkovsky refused, perhaps Nice Putin would have mounted a legal challenge to his ownership of Yukos, citing the transparently corrupt ways in which the "loans-for-shares" auctions were run in 1995. As president of Russia, acting on behalf of the Russian people, Nice Putin would have been within his rights to do this. He could easily have renationalized Yukos without actually jailing Khodorkovsky. That would have been the more politic thing to do. And it is likely that Nice Putin would have done it.

Nice Putin would in a similar spirit have carried out many of the same policies as actual Putin but in a gentler, wiser fashion. The regional governors who had been elected throughout the 1990s were for the most part corrupt thugs in league with local criminal gangs and/or major corporate concerns. Just like actual Putin, Nice Putin would have wanted them replaced. Perhaps, however, rather than simply canceling elections as Putin did in 2004, Nice Putin would have sent election observers to the regions to make certain that elections were free and fair. Nice Putin could have set up an election fund so that local civic leaders could compete for advertising and billboard space with local bosses, and he would have made sure that laws about equal television access were strictly complied with. He might even have gone ahead and eliminated some of the more odious candidates by passing (or enforcing?) laws restricting anyone with a criminal conviction from running for office. Nice Putin’s difficult and, for the election observers, dangerous reforms could have gone a long way toward ensuring the provinces more honest governors.

One could continue in this vein for a while. We can see that there'd have been serious differences between Nice Putin and actual Putin in the implementation of their various initiatives, but the underlying problems that they would be trying to address would, by and large, be the same.

***

And now to the real question at hand. What would Nice Putin have done about Ukraine?

This is a vexing question. A few months ago I was asked in a survey of Russia "experts" whether I thought the current crisis in Ukraine was primarily the result of NATO expansion or, rather, Putin's aggressive foreign policy. I was flummoxed. The answer was certainly "both," but this was not an answer: The question was which of them was more to blame. Would Putin have behaved this way if NATO were not expanding? Conversely, would someone who wasn't Putin (Nice Putin, say) have behaved this way if NATO was?

Before we get to Nice Putin, consider Russian foreign policy in its "near abroad" over the past 25 years. Probably the worst thing Putin has done in the past year is to encourage and arm the separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine. The rebel forces are made up of local miners, veterans and criminals, volunteer Cossacks and Caucasians, and Russian regulars. Where have we seen some of these people before? The answer is: Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992-93. At the time, we heard the same denials of involvement from the Russian higher-ups (not one of whom was named Putin), followed by the same obvious proof of their complicity. Some of the volunteer heroes were even the same: Igor Strelkov, leader of the initial invasion of eastern Ukraine in April 2014, got his first taste of combat in Transnistria in 1992. (Shamil Basaev, later the military hero of the Chechen rebellion, got his first taste of combat in Abkhazia that year; his later war, the Chechen one, was started by Boris Yeltsin.)