Putin's straight talk on taxes and property rights

■"Putin Tells Business to Get Used to Paying Taxes," by Erin E. Arvedlund, New York Times, 17 November 2004, p. W1.

Putin is preaching a new sort of quid pro quo. In the last decades of socialism in the Soviet Union, it was said among the masses that "we pretend to work and the state pretends to pay us." I like to describe late Brezhnevism as "the state pretends to rule over us and we pretend to obey."

Well, Putin's proposing something better, something along the lines of "you pay taxes and the state will respect your property rights." Sounds pretty good, huh? Not exactly the return of authoritarianism.

This is my notion on Russia's "progress": so long as Putin doesn't reinstitute vertical control over the economy, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will improve over time. His recent reinstitution of vertical control over the political system tells us little of Russia's potential future evolutions, other than Moscow believes in a Go Slow approach on politics, much like Beijing does.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it's probably a very good thing. As Putin declares, "Fear in unproductive." To which I add, business likes transparency and certainty.

Putin is moving hard to make both happen in the economic and legal realms, and he needs to hoard a certain amount of political power to push all that change through over the long haul.

As always, we need to be patientóand largely ignore the panicked cries of former Soviet experts on the former Soviet Union, for, as a great leader once said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Just think of Putin's version as a Globalization Era updating of that classic phrase.