Thus, more than 80 percent of Russians voted for a former KGB agent or a communist. After nine years of U.S.-assisted reform, IMF and World Bank loans and dialogue with the European Union, the Council of Europe and NATO, not to mention four years of perestroika, Russian citizens overwhelmingly supported candidates with either avowedly anti-Western views or suspected enmity for the West, democratic ideals and free-market economics. How has this happened in a land scarred by decades of uniquely vicious secret police repression and ruinous communist rule? What does this mean for Russia and its relations with the West?

Monday's election results would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. During the late 1980s and the early '90s, pro-Western politicians and dissidents (Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Anatoly Sobchak and Andrei Sakharov, to name some) dominated Russian politics and national life. The reactionary communist coup attempt in August of 1991 was foiled in part by thousands of democracy-minded protesters who confronted tanks in the streets of Moscow. Russia's liberal media vilified the KGB and communists, and dissidents who had resisted KGB repression were heroes.

In many ways, former President Boris Yeltsin was a benign figure. But his true legacy will be his constitution, which effectively makes the Russian president a czar. It is difficult to imagine that Putin, with Yeltsin's empowering constitution in hand, will be benign. Indeed, there is reason to fear just the opposite.

While much of the Western press has been preoccupied with the question, "Who is Putin?" the new president's KGB background speaks volumes about his likely proclivities. The war he launched in Chechnya and his treatment of Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky confirm his resolve and attitude to criticism. And his own words, which are often the argot of cops and thugs (he has famously promised to "rub out" Chechen "bandits" in their "outhouses," for example) leave Russians with little doubt about what they can expect from him.

Putin has never released a campaign program, but at times he has made statements about what he would do if elected. He has said that he plans to raise defense spending by 57 percent to "respond to new geopolitical realities, both external and internal threats." He has pledged to restore a "comprehensive system of state regulation of the economy." He has described Russians as "not ready to abandon traditional dependence on the state and become self-reliant individuals," and said that they want "a restoration of the guiding and regulatory role of the state." Most chillingly, he has praised the KGB as the guardian of Russia's national interests and advocated the establishment of a "dictatorship of the law."

"Dictatorship" has a special ring for Russians. Millions of Russians perished during almost three decades of Stalin's dictatorship. That dictatorship operated according to a constitution and code of laws that rendered illegal everything from tardiness in the workplace to less than enthusiastic remarks about the Leader to the "suspicion of espionage" -- a crime punishable by death. In Russia, "diktatura" means blood and beatings, prison camps and shackles. Laws can be composed (and imposed) according to the whims of the ruler.

It seems implausible that Putin would attempt to resurrect in full the dictatorial practices of the Stalin years -- a generation of Russians has grown up with the freedoms of perestroika and the Yeltsin era, and task of stifling them would appear unmanageable. But his treatment of the press and repetition of the word "dictatorship" do not bode well, and may indicate that he plans to try.

Despite all this, Russians elected former KGB agent Putin president. Why?

Let us first dismiss the wishful thinking and delusional cant about Russia promulgated by certain Western reporters and various officials of the Clinton administration -- that Russia has been "on the path of reform," "in transition," "building a free market," "establishing democracy" and so on. On the one hand, much has changed in Russia since Gorbachev introduced perestroika: Elections have been free if not fair; political debate has been, at least until recently, lively and unrestricted; private commerce has been legalized, if controlled by the mafia and monopolies; citizens have been allowed to travel. But the general trends have been negative and disappointing.

Russians have watched their country slip from the promising turmoil of the perestroika years to the communists-vs.-Yeltsin street-fight passions of the early '90s to the contract killings, rigged auctions and pervasive atmosphere of criminality of roughly the past five years. In view of all this mayhem, the optimism professed by Western politicians about Yeltsin's reforms sounded more than misguided. It came across to Russians as rhetoric meant to support thieving Russian oligarchs and corrupt Russian officials operating with two aims -- to enrich themselves and to weaken Russia for the benefit of the West, the United States in particular.

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