Legacy:

There has been a lot of talk about Vladimir Putin’s legacy. On Friday, he gave a 45-minute speech that, as Pravda put it, was meant “to remind everyone of the terrible situation in Russia before Putin.” But Putin’s real legacy needs no speech or spin.

In less than three months, he plans to turn over the presidency to his anointed heir, Dmitry Medvedev, through elections that will be a mockery of democracy. And the strange paranoia and vindictiveness of Putin are on display everywhere, notably in Russia’s frozen far east, where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is languishing in a subarctic labor camp, his Yukos oil company grabbed by Putin’s people.

Last week, under strong pressure from abroad and a hunger strike by Khodorkovsky, prison authorities said that they would transfer Aleksanyan to a civilian clinic. The Kremlin and its apologists always have the same explanation: look how bad things were; surely the most important thing is to rein in the oligarchs and restore political and economic stability. But that does not justify the setbacks to the rule of law, the systematic hounding of rivals and

critics, the constant snarling at the West or the massive state inroads into private enterprise. In five years, the state has increased its share of the stock market from 24 percent to 40 percent. These are Putin’s true legacy. — The New York Times