This week, I’m off back to the UK, after almost four years in Russia. No, I haven’t been expelled by the Foreign Ministry, it’s simply time to go home and begin a new project in the UK.  

I can take this chance to look back on the Russia in which I arrived back in January 2004, and how much has changed. Moscow has certainly changed. It’s become more of a European capital. People ride bicycles around the streets. You see fewer packs of wild dogs, more cafeterias. People dress less like gangstas and more like elegant bourgeoisie. It even seems hip to be gay in Moscow these days.  

Russia is far more confident today than when I arrived, in that dark year of 2004, when Beslan shocked the world, when the political elite was riven by the struggle between Putin and Khodorkovsky, when the banking sector lurched into crisis, and the stock market plummeted.  

Since then, a new form of government has emerged. Yeltsin may have died this year, but 2004 was, in some ways, the last gasp of the Yeltsin years. It was the last gasp of the oligarchs as an alternate power centre to the Kremlin. It was the last gasp of the regional governors as an alternate power centre.  

It was also, perhaps, the last gasp of the Chechen resistance, the year of bombs in Moscow, of Beslan, of the killing of Akhmad Kadyrov, and of the beginning of the rise of Ramzan Kadyrov.  

After 2004, a tremendous silence fell on Russian political life. It is the silence of no competition, the silence of a single executive ruler completely dominating the political space of a country.  

This made writing about Russia less interesting. In 2005, we still had the Yukos case to write about, and the rise of the Siloviki. By 2006, we all knew who the Siloviki were, and the extent to which they now controlled the country. All there was left to write about was the wave of IPOs, as the Siloviki sold off minority stakes in state companies to themselves.  

Let’s take a step back, and again express our amazement that a small caste of St. Petersburg spies could take over a whole country – its national television, its political institutions, its army, its judiciary, its economy. A remarkable achievement, no less remarkable than the takeover of the country by the oligarchs of the 1990s. And, no doubt, a more permanent achievement, because the oligarchs of the 1990s competed among themselves.

The Russian people, so far, seem content to let this small group of 20 or so people run their country, control their assets, dictate an economic policy that enriches themselves, while censoring any criticism of themselves on TV.

So far, the Russian people are happily accepting the line that this brave band of knights is defending Russia from the imperialism of the West, from the attempt to takeover Russia Orange-style, as the West has taken over Georgia or Ukraine.

In other words, most Russians are still thinking like people from the developing world, because that is precisely how developing world governments get their people to accept their theft and corruption – by painting themselves as defenders of the country’s honour from western imperialists. Look at Robert Mugabe, or Daniel Arap Moi, or Aliaksandr Lukashenka.

In a developed country, by contrast, you hold your own government to account, rather than blaming all your problems on foreign imperialists.

The frustrating thing with writing about Russia, at the moment, is that it’s simply a matter of patience. We have to wait for the growth of the middle class, for a class of educated people who don’t believe what they see on TV. Until that happens, the only check on the Russian government is big business and foreign powers.  

In that sense, I welcome the UK’s decision to expel four Russian FSB diplomats from Britain. It wouldn’t have done so if the Kremlin had taken any steps to deal with Andrei Lugovoi, a man who wandered around London with an atomic weapon, which he then used to kill a man in a public place.  

Does the Kremlin think the UK is so laissez-faire that it would just accept that crime? Do Russians themselves want a government that celebrates rogue murderers with atomic weapons on state TV, that fails to call them to account, that apparently values the lives of individuals as nothing compared to Great Power politics?

Yes, Russians don’t care about that, because they are not yet educated enough to see that while dictators might shake swords at other countries and make a humiliated population feel good about itself, in the end, they always end up punishing their own people. Think of Idi Amin, Stalin, Hitler, Milosevic. Dictators always end up hurting their own people.  

But too many Russians don’t see this yet, because they still have a peasant attitude, which trusts in a strong ruler rather than in institutions that check the power of that ruler. We all get the government we deserve. So we have to wait for the middle class, and hope the Siloviki don’t cause too much trouble in the meantime.  

Well, if ever I or other westerners get too preachy to Russians, just answer them with one word: Iraq. Look at the goddamn mess we created in Iraq. There’s an article by Timothy Garton-Ash in the Guardian today, which says that it’s “the single biggest unavoidable man-made tragedy to have happened in the last twenty-five years”.  

That’s about right. It will likely lead to: the further rise of radical Islam, the recruitment of many new terrorists, the huge loss of further civilian lives in an Iraq torn by civil war, possibly the separation of Iraq into separate countries, and the consequent weakening of other Muslim states with both Sunni and Shia populations, the alienation of Turkey from the West, and the discrediting of liberal democracy in the eyes of the world.

The weakening of US power happens just as other nations, such as China, India and Russia, are rising to power. For a liberal sceptic like myself, this is a worrying phenomenon. America can have fits of profound stupidity, but I still trust in its institutional mechanisms to prevent it from going completely off the rails. It is, for better or worse, a robust society that has been through many crises, and to some extent corrected itself. I trust in a basically sane and educated majority in the US, who will defend the values I believe in – civil rights, the rational quest for meaning and moral value, openness to criticism and debate, cultural freedom, freedom to pursue one’s religious beliefs as one wants, the power to hold one’s government to account, and respect for the environment.  

The present American government is not so hot an example of the above values. Instead, it has condoned torture, and ignored serious environmental threats to our civilization. But that doesn’t mean those values are discredited. It means the Bush government is discredited for preaching them without itself observing them. America, as a rational and open society, is now beginning to correct itself on these issues.

I worry about what values will rise with the rise of the new superpowers. What values does Russia have? What values do Russian people have? It’s not an accusation, it’s a genuine question. Tell me. What do you believe in? What kind of world would you like, apart from one where your country is strong?

What about the Chinese? Do they care about the environment, or the dignity of human life? Are they interested in the universal search for meaning and human emancipation, or simply in the material glory of their own empires?  

I know that human rationality is universal. And we all, in different ways, want to be free and to be happy. We all want to live in harmony with our environments. Cultures differ, of course, as to how to achieve that. But, as we enter a new age of multipolarity, I hope we can converse rationally, and try to find the best ways for our species to go forward.

Jules Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

July 20, 2007