The clash of Russian and American ideologies, this time, isn’t that of communism versus capitalism so much as it’s something far more fundamental: a tug-of-war between totalitarianism/kleptocracy on the one hand, and freedom -- transparent democracy -- on the other.

By kleptocracy I mean what journalists have meant for years: the amoral wholesale thievery of monetary wealth and infrastructure assets, perpetrated by a shrewd and conniving elite few, which has raged in the Former Soviet Union for over a decade. Some of these nouveau-riche billionaires are ex-Soviet ministers who grabbed entire industries which they once oversaw as faceless bureaucrats. Others are opportunistic entrepreneurs, who collected untold riches by purchasing chunks of privatizing corporations on the cheap; they bought out the stock vouchers, mistakenly perceived by most as worthless, via which Moscow transferred ownership fairly to every working citizen. The tribulations of Yukos Oil and its imprisoned ex-CEO show that dangerous shifts are occurring in this volatile kleptocracy, as power brokers, political and economic, turn on each other like sharks. There really is no honor among thieves.

This leads right to my next point: A dictatorship needs a dictator. Russia has one in my opinion (but certainly not in my opinion alone): Vladimir Putin -- former KGB crony of Yuri Andropov (aka “the Butcher of Budapest”) -- and himself for several years head of the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB secret police. Some readers will already be aware of Putin’s anti-democratic actions since he gained the very top Kremlin post, Russia’s presidency, in early 2000 -- more by Boris Yeltsin’s anointing him as acting successor, and by FSB extortion of viable competitors, than by any honest and open popular vote.

The anti-democratic moves, so far, include seizing the right to pick Russia’s 89 regional governors, who in recent years were chosen by direct elections. Worse, local parliaments that disagree with Putin’s gubernatorial choices can be dissolved if he merely gives the word. (Putin used the infamous terrorist siege of a school in North Ossetia as his excuse for strengthening centralized personal control.) Putin’s meddling in the internal politics of a sovereign nation, Ukraine, by aggressively taking sides in a disputed presidential election that the UN and Western countries have called corrupt, seems to show that the expansionist tendencies of Russia are virulent, still. It shouldn’t be a surprise. This striving to influence buffer states in Russia’s “near abroad,” and in the process also improve access through nautical choke points that otherwise bottle up Russian fleets, isn’t associated solely with communism -- it dates to Czar Peter the Great around 1700, even earlier. The goal has been a deeply ingrained imperative of Russian statecraft and scheming in every era since, including today.

Signs of the new-age anti-U.S. brushfire engagement by proxy abound. Russia behaved quite contrarily during the Kosovo Crisis. In fact, it was a road race between U.S. and Russian forces to be first to occupy an important airfield -- a race that the U.S. lost -- which led straight to the controversial, rushed development of the Stryker armored car. Russian technicians were actively helping Saddam Hussein construct ballistic missiles whose range far exceeded the maximum permitted by UN sanctions -- and this work continued until just before U.S. troops went into Iraq. Russia is also, according to some reports, a supplier of expertise and technology that Iran has been using in its nuclear research -- even as Iran yanks Europe’s and the IAEA’s chains over halting Tehran’s alleged (I’m being polite) atomic weapons program. Russia, like the USSR before it, has been a major exporter of both diesel and nuclear-powered submarines to nations (Iran, India, China, and Libya among them) whose interests, to put it mildly, don’t always entirely coincide with America’s.

Another destabilizing factor for Russia and its environs is the devastation of AIDS, now spreading in that country like the plague. Within a decade, maybe two, at the rate new AIDS cases are happening, Russia will lack enough healthy youths to serve its basic defensive needs. There is, unfortunately, a substitute for massed able-bodied manpower, one that can a) be very effective as a deterrent with worldwide reach, b) serve to intimidate peoples living just beyond the Russian Federation’s restless borders, and -- in extremis -- c) provide a means to prosecute a local or global shooting war. I’m referring to nuclear weapons, which Putin himself has publicly said will form the backbone of Moscow’s next-generation military muscle.

Russia invested ambitiously to deploy a new ICBM, the SS-27, specifically designed to get through any conceivable U.S. missile-shield protective system. An SS-27, reportedly, can carry a single warhead with a yield of up to a megaton, along with countermeasures and decoys, plus hardening against anti-missile lasers and electromagnetic pulses, with the ability for the warhead’s atmospheric reentry body to maneuver intelligently against last-ditch kinetic-kill ABM weapons. Russia is well aware that the missile shield system presently being contemplated in the U.S. would be of limited capacity, intended only to intercept (if it ever works right) a small number of rogue or terrorist ICBMs: a wise insurance policy indeed for America. Russia already has more than enough older-model ICBMs to utterly swamp the Bush administration’s desired missile shield, as Putin is fully aware -- and the U.S. has more than once offered to freely share missile-shield technology with Russia. Reagan said this to Gorbachev repeatedly, but was never believed. Alas, one reason that the USSR sometimes quickly violated arms reduction treaties signed with the U.S. and others was a total lack of trust of the outside world on Moscow’s part, verging on rampant paranoia. (One pact that banned germ warfare R&D, ratified in the early 1970s, is an infamous example of subsequent Soviet widespread cheating.)

So, why would a supposedly cash-strapped Russia, bristling with hundreds of H-bomb-tipped ICBMs as it is, have spent heavily on deploying several operational SS-27 missile regiments (comprising a dozen-plus silo-based or mobile SS-27s per regiment), with more on the way, unless the Kremlin’s agenda was inherently belligerent -- militarily, diplomatically, and most of all psychologically? An ABM system limited to stopping a handful of terrorist (or even just accidental) ICBM launches is not destabilizing against the US/Russia mutual assured destruction status quo -- except at the level of bellicose (or misguided “anti-nuke”) rhetoric and propaganda. A hypermodern Russian ICBM, surpassing in capability even the best ones deployed by the U.S., introduces a new form, a new dimension, of completely unnecessary overkill into the old “Dr. Strangelove” equation.

There seems only one explanation: Putin is eager to restore his Motherland to the posture of an armed camp, thus strengthening his grip and regaining superpower prestige, and maybe even escalate a new thermonuclear arms race, regardless of the price tag and effect on the living standard of his people. Yet those same patriotic people, suffering terrible unemployment and starvation during the experiment with capitalism that failed in the 1990s, welcome their newest strongman so long as he puts at least some bread back on their table; MP3 players and designer jeans they can do without, and they know it. This sounds awfully similar to what went on at the height of the Cold War. But decades back, Russia hadn’t discovered and started to tap its immense Siberian oil and natural gas reserves, which threaten to provide more-than-ample sustained financing for Putin’s buildup.

If it’s true that a Second Cold War is starting, it’s sad to watch the Kremlin failing the world. While America and our Allies are working our hearts out and spilling our blood to help spread freedom internationally, autocrats and oligarchs in Moscow set an appalling example by throwing Russia hard into reverse.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com