No matter how you look at it, President Putin also brought order to Chechnya: at least they’re no longer flying young Russian soldiers back in body bags every day. And if television is offering more humorous programs and songs from around the world instead of political discussions, people only welcome this. As for opposition parties, the real ones, they quarreled among themselves and became so indistinguishable in their radical demands that the people, with President Putin’s help, stopped taking note of them.

Image Credit... Paul Rogers

For the majority of Russians, Mr. Putin will enter history as a positive figure. That during his rule he actively relied on his K.G.B. colleagues doesn’t bother a lot of people. Whom else should he lean on in his struggle to impose order? He worked with the human material that came to him from the depth of Russian history, people who to this day drink, steal and consider politics a source of personal power and enrichment. If Mr. Putin preferred not to be trusting, it was because he clearly sensed the rot in the national gene pool.

That he went too far in some things, that he irritated Europe, that he was sometimes vindictive  these are separate matters. His friends in the K.G.B. were raised on hatred for the West. Now, at least, they limit themselves for the most part to negative rhetoric about the West. So there is progress. Mr. Putin gave his people faith in tomorrow: It’s no accident that Russia today is full of packed restaurants, game parlors, casinos, discothèques, cars and books about everything from Buddhism to homosexuality. Mr. Putin was lucky all eight of his years in office: oil prices rose, Russia grew rich and life became good. Private life remains remarkably free.

His biggest mistake was his longing to make Russia the successor to the Soviet Union: this gave rise to the imperial discourse that so frightened neighboring countries, his defense of the Soviet Union’s aggressive foreign policy and the damage to Russia’s image in the world. What’s worse is that our next president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, whom President Putin chose as his heir as if he were a czar, will have to deal with the Russian weaknesses that were hidden from the population under propaganda slogans. The failure to modernize industry or agriculture, the growing corruption in government, the ubiquitous drunkenness, the record numbers of murders and suicides, the terrible state of Russian health care and the problems that come with a shrinking population will fall on Mr. Medvedev’s young shoulders.

Nobody, probably not even President Putin, knows Mr. Medvedev’s real goals and values. He was never a public politician  though the talk on the street, not shared by dissidents, makes him out to be liberal, cultured, moderate and even pro-Western. As a young man he fought for democracy on the side of the future mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, and he was never noted for professional connections to the secret services. Yet his close ties to his current chief speak, at least, to limitless patience and self-limitation.