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If Mikhail Gorbachev, the founding father of modern day Russia, were still holding the office of the President today, the values of GlastnostPerestroika would still be enshrined. The Oligarchs who had risen from humble backgrounds would still keep their fortunes and perhaps the relations with the Western World would be better.

Mr, Gorbachev sadly has been out of office for more than a decade; Vladimir Putin is President. There is still transparency and officiality in the government, yet it appears diluted, most of the oligarchs are either in jail (Yukos tycoon Mikhail Khordorkovsky) or in exile (Boris Berezovsky), and while Putin and Dubya may appear to be the best of friends, the oppression of civil liberties in the former Soviet Union states of Ukraine and Belarus have left the rest of the Western world unhappy.

Mr. Putin’s biggest mistake on the international front perhaps is the jailing of Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khordovsky late last year for his political ambitions. Khordovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man and top oligarch (a group of elite Russian businessmen who pull strings economically and politically) apparently wanted to run for President to Mr. Putin’s dismay, and the Russian government had Khordovsky jailed when his plane landed in Russia. Today, Yukos has been charged with backdated tax bills worth US$25billion and its top oil-producing subsidiary Yuganskneftegaz, is in the process of being sold at a huge discount to (surprise, surprise) Russian state-run monopoly Gazrom.

This affair has led to the Kremlin receiving international criticism as many believe that Khordovsky was arrested not because of his alleged tax evasion but rather because of his political ambitions. On his day in court earlier this year, hundreds of his supporters protested in front of the Court where he was read his charges, demanding his freedom, which, today, sadly remains in the hands of Russian jailers.

Next comes Russia’s relations with two former Union states in the Ukraine and Belarus Republics. Belarus’ President, Alexander Lukashenka (widely assumed to be a Kremlim puppet), recently won an allegedly-rigged referendum that will allow him to stay on as President for another term when his current term expires in 2006. His oppression of democracy is equally well known (NGOs and the like were forced by his government to re-register their status in the late 1990s or face criminalization).

While in the Clinton administration, the International League for Human Rights wrote an open-letter to then-Vice President of the United States Al Gore to demand action from the United States against Lukashenka’s “abrogation of international human rights agreements and increasingly autocratic rule have been accompanied by greater integration with neighboring Russia.” The United States, sadly, failed to deliver what was asked of them and today the threat of the integration of Belarus back into Russia seems omnipresent, even though the prospects of a union seemed to have soured somewhat. London’s The Economist Newspaper claims that Mr. Putin finds Lukashenka a useful idiot, if an exasperating one.

Yet, should one nation return back to Russia, it would appear that the message sent to the rest of the world is that the Soviet Union’s ideals are stirring again. The likes of Lenin, Karl Marx and Stalin have long been laid to rest, but their ideals have not.