Russia

I owe you a plain statement of what I mean by failure, because the word does a great deal of work and I do not want it to do more than I intend. A state is a human instrument. It is not a nation, not a culture, not a church, and not the sum of a people. It is a machine that is built, in the words of the American preamble that I have spent years defending, to secure the blessings of liberty for those who live inside it. Judged by that purpose, a state succeeds when the people subject to it can imagine a better life for their children than the one they inherited, and it fails when they cannot. This essay is an argument that the Russian state, as it is presently constituted, has failed at that task by almost every measure that matters. It is also an argument, and I want to be unambiguous about this, that the failure belongs to the state and the system, not to the Russian people, who are its victims and not its authors. ...