A Monopoly on Blame (Moscow Times, RUSSIA)

It's an ironic parallel. For eight years, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush have moved in tandem. Russia enjoyed two terms of Putin, whereas the United States had the pleasure of two terms of Bush.

But on Tuesday, the United States will move on. Bush will leave the nation depressed and dispirited, its economy stuck in the worst slump in nearly 80 years. Whether he will be judged by posterity as harshly as he has been by contemporaries or whether history will somehow exonerate him, he will be gone and his team in Washington will be replaced with new faces.

Not so in Russia. The country has had a new president for nearly a year, but Putin unquestionably remains the country's most powerful man. If he were to abdicate completely and become, as it has been rumored, the head of Gazprom, supreme power in Russia would likely migrate to the corner office of the state-controlled gas monopoly.

Since summer, Putin's legacy has begun to look as tarnished as Bush's in the United States. Putin offered a bargain to the Russian people: They would enjoy stability and growing prosperity but stay out of politics and away from big business in which Putin's friends, supporters and former siloviki colleagues were growing immensely rich. Now that the global crisis has undermined Russia's prosperity, the political model of the past decade is starting to strain. Even Putin's approval ratings are slumping.

Still, there is little chance that the political establishment will loosen its grip on power.

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