Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Russians await Putin’s fall

The Record

With Russians taking to the streets to protest the recent flawed parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suddenly ceased to be an inevitable leader. He may think that this spring he will be elected president — the job he held from 2000 to 2008 — and serve up to 12 more years in that office.

But I, like many Russians, think the regime will fall before the March election or soon after.

As Putin’s grasp on the country loosens, I wonder: What would Russia look like today if he had never come to power? And now, what might be in store for a post-Putin Russia?

Twelve and a half years ago, then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked Putin as his successor from a tiny pool of bureaucrats who had remained loyal to him when his popularity plummeted. If Yeltsin had picked someone else, it almost certainly would have been another little-known functionary. This person would probably have been, like Putin, afflicted with severe nostalgia for the Soviet past — when the country was feared, the trains ran on time and most people did not like to stand out from the crowd. But this hypothetical bureaucrat’s love of all things Soviet would probably have been more obvious to the West than Putin’s has been.