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If Clinton wins, she will have to deal with Putin, an endeavor in which she has failed before.

Indeed, a number of laws adopted in Russia in recent years are designed specifically to silence Putin’s opponents and make it impossible for them to preach a liberal agenda the way Clinton does in her video.

There is another side to this story, though. If Clinton wins, she will have to deal with Putin, an endeavor in which she has failed before. In 2009, as U.S. secretary of state, she presented her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with a big red push button with the word “Reset” on it in English and in Russian. Only she got the Russian translation wrong: instead of the correct “perezagruzka,” the inscription said “peregruzka,” or “overload.” Lavrov and Clinton were able to laugh about it then, but the mistake turned out to be prophetic. Things went downhill quickly and, last year, Clinton likened Putin to Hitler.

Putin blamed Clinton’s department for fomenting the middle class protests that roiled Moscow in 2011-2012.

Indeed, it’s partly Clinton’s fault that a video like hers is unimaginable in today’s Russian politics. It was on her watch as secretary of state that Putin finally gave up on the idea of building some kind of alliance with the West: He blamed her department for fomenting the middle class protests that roiled Moscow in 2011-2012. After those fruitless demonstrations, Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament passed dozens of restrictive laws such as the ones I cited above.

Perhaps there was little Clinton could have done to stop Putin from becoming paranoid about Western interference, but at the least she contributed to the U.S. failure to lead by example. And, through her candidacy, she continues to do so: Clinton personifies, along with her potential Republican rival for the White House Jeb Bush, the worrying ascendancy of presidential dynasties in the U.S. From a Russian standpoint, these don’t look much better than Putin’s job-switching tandem with former President (and now Prime Minister again) Dmitri Medvedev.

Despite the exclusionary role that dynasties and money play in today’s U.S. presidential elections, however, any suggestion of equivalence with Russia is false. U.S. candidates are genuinely free to tell voters what they like, and the party in opposition is protected, not sabotaged, by the law. As Winston Churchill might have said, U.S.-style democracy in 2015 is the worst form of government, except for the alternative.

Bloomberg News

Leonid Bershidsky is a Berlin-based writer.