Edward Lucas writes in The Chronicle Review (hat tip: Arts & Letters):

Russia will be weaker in 10 years. Its population is falling by a million people a year. From a Slavic Russian-chauvinist point of view (i.e., that held by many senior officials), even that dismal statistic is too optimistic. Russia's Muslim minority, currently around a fifth of the population, is growing fast, just as "ethnic Russians" are shrinking in number.

Russia will be weaker militarily, partly because it will lack the numbers of young men it needs to sustain a conscript army, but also because of corruption. Like all others engaged in public procurement in Russia, the military finds it almost impossible to spend large sums of money honestly and effectively.

That is a symptom of a wider problem: the failure of the Putin experiment to modernize Russia's archaic system of public administration. Putin's successor, Medvedev, talks a lot about anticorruption efforts. But it is hard to see those starting where they need to start: at the very top. It is there that tens of billions of dollars have been diverted into the "pocket companies" of the elite, such as RosUkrEnergo, Gunvor, and the like. Without a free press or a real opposition to ask embarrassing questions, such criminally cozy arrangements will persist.

The slide into a fascist kleptocracy is corrosive to Russia's chances of joining the rest of the developed world, where — by virtue of its education level and aspirations — it certainly belongs. That decline endangers even Russia's survival as a unified country.

One key issue is ideology. How much of the propaganda about a "new Byzantium" do those in power really believe? Is it sentiment just made up to fool the Russian people? Or is it becoming the guiding principle for policy decisions?

Second, will the business and professional class that has grown up since the financial crash of 1998 morph into a real middle class? That could change Russia's prospects: A middle class demands both a law-governed state and moral values in society. But the signs are not promising. The huge opportunities for graft in Russia are creating a self-interested state bureaucracy that does not want to change the system off which it feeds. Middle-class incomes are not the same as middle-class values...