A timely paper by Stanford University professors Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss has just been published in the January/February 2008 edition of Foreign Affairs. The article’s title says it all: “The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin’s Crackdown Holds Russia Back.” A PDF version of the article can be downloaded here. First, a disclosure: I have read and admired the scholarship of these distinguished academics for years, and I have recently had the pleasure to meet with them at Stanford, where I attended a joint seminar that was had standing-room-only attendance from scholars throughout the university.