Some more shots are exchanged over the realism vs. liberalism issue.  From Paul Goble’s Window on Eurasia:

In an essay posted on Grani.ru today, Irina Pavlova points out that “the post-Soviet powers that be have done everything to revile and marginalize the liberal idea in Russia and those few liberals who were and remain the true supporters of this idea,” something that the liberals themselves assisted by their involvement in the nomenklatura privatization of the 1990s.

But with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000 and his efforts to demonize that period and “strengthen the regime,” the situation became even more dire for liberals as the Russian government moved in a direction which even its apologists in Russia and the West say is “little distinguished from a dictatorship.”