Putin, Like Palin, Faces An Oil Crisis

Keith Gessen has a dispatch from Moscow:

What would it take for this regime to stumble? People have been saying for a long time that Putin will not be tested until oil prices fall. Now oil prices are falling, and Putin-Medvedev are mostly blaming the United States and stoking up anger at Ukraine’s president. If oil prices keep falling, their magnificent cash reserves – $500 billion before the current crisis – could, in a country of 140 million people, turn out to be less handy than they’d thought. There is right now no movement and certainly no political party that could challenge the Kremlin – the Kremlin has spared no money or effort in making sure of that.

…If things are going to fall apart, Moscow could well be the place they fall apart most quickly. What happened in the years of extremely high energy prices was something more familiar than a yearning for the ‘strong hand’. The Russian people were offered a bribe and they took it. Why not? But now the bribe is running out, and anything could happen. What you realise under the giant vaulted ceilings of Garage, or simply on the streets, in the alleyways, where an ancient metropolis was once rearranged to serve the people, is that it’s happened here before.