Over the weekend Owen Matthews published a preemptive political obituary of President Dmitry Medvedev in Newsweek, pointing out that all of the problems that he has tried (and mostly failed) to confront in Russian society were specifically made by the hand of Vladimir Putin.  It’s a pretty devastating and concise summary of the key issues.

During his two terms in office, Russia’s bureaucracy doubled in size, while according to Transparency International, the size of the “bribe economy” increased 10-fold. The bureaucracy became the business elite as the state–from the Kremlin to provincial governors and even local policemen–swallowed up private businesses.