A few more words on the burial of Russian constitutionalism today:
I've spent years wondering what went wrong. My colleagues who were right about this often just said: "Well, it's Russia." That's not good enough. An expert's job is not just to be right, it's to know why. /1

Two theories:
1. Putin was always this bad and people like me missed it; he was a cruise missile fired by the power ministries into the heart of Russian democracy.
2. Putin changed over time.
/2

A third theory is that the U.S. and West botched the Russian transition, but that gives way too much power to the U.S. and is a tad narcissistic, imo. I prefer to think that the combination of the Soviet destruction of society and Putin's growing power as a mafia don were key. /3

I think if Putin had not come back for a third term, Russian history would be different. But the mafia dynamics are that Putin couldn't feel safe anywhere but in power. Others argue Putin was set to destroy the democratic system from day one. I'm less sure. /4

If we just write this off to "It's how Russians are" or "it's all Putin," then we're not going to be ready for thinking about transitions of power later. In 1999 I would not have predicted this outcome; my pessimistic colleagues called it better than I did. /5

My biggest mistake was optimism. It's not an expert's job to be optimistic; it's our job to be empirical. I think, as an old Cold Warrior, I was invested in that hope. That's an error, and I have to own that.
/6x