While Russia, with its high literacy rates and quasi-European culture, cannot be compared with the much less developed Arab world, Putin's Russia does contain a scent of the thuggery and benightedness that characterized former regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Because Putin is not a modernizer -- he is building neither a civil society nor a 21st century knowledge economy -- he is leading Russia toward a familiar dead end, from which only chaos or more autocracy can issue.
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