Andrei Illarionov doesn’t think that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is really helping matters in Russia when she offers her endorsement of Vladimir Putin’s selected candidate. Writing in the Washington Post today, he reasonably asks why Rice is “dead silent” on the fates of other pro-democracy figures such as Vladimir Ryzhkov and Garry Kasparov. He declares “This duplicitous game has real consequences. Rice’s endorsement of Medvedev is interpreted in the Kremlin as carte blanche for an undemocratic succession.”