Putin's end

Leon Aron writes that the protest movement currently sweeping Russia may signal the end of the country's self-styled strongman, but that lasting change will require more than protest:

Quite apart from all the obvious and increasingly deadening flaws that have emerged under Putin, his regime's fatal deficiency is moral, even existential. For the Russian Internet generation that has lead the protests, guided by Facebook and inspired by LiveJournal blogs, a generation whose members were young children or in their early teens when the Soviet Union collapsed, it is an inconceivable existential monstrosity, an utterly bizarre anachronism, for a great and proud European nation to have someone -- anyone -- in power for 24 years (which is what many think Putin aspires to if "reelected" for two six-year terms). This is six years longer than Brezhnev and only a few years short of Stalin. "You've got to be kidding!" and "This sucks!" may not be among the categories of political science, but they are fair representations of the growing sentiment on Russian blogs and Facebook pages.

What may be necessary is an entirely new sense of political culture:

Where will such a culture come from? It looks increasingly like a lasting progressive change will have to come from below and from outside the political class. It will have to be generated by a mature, self-aware civil society capable and willing to control the executive -- a civil society that is not only equal to but above it. In all revolutions, an activist minority is enough to finish off the old regime and install a new political or economic order (and, in the Russian case some 20 years ago, both). But maintaining these institutions in accordance with new political, economic, and social moralities requires a diffusion of these values to many more -- perhaps orders of magnitude more -- people. It will take "masses" willing and able to supervise these state institutions to make sure that they faithfully reflect these new values.

(Image via the Atlantic Wire)