“A Normal Country” by Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, in Foreign Affairs (March–April 2004), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

Alas, poor Russia: no longer the Evil Em­pire, but now a near basket case with criminals riding high, the long-suffering populace economically worse off, and democracy still a distant dream. That’s a common assessment these days—but it’s far too gloomy, maintain Shleifer, an economist at Harvard University, and Treisman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Russia “began the 1990s as a highly distorted and disintegrating centrally planned economy, with severe shortages of consumer goods and a massive military establishment. It ended the decade as a normal, middle-income capitalist economy.” By then, too, “its political leaders were being chosen in generally free—if flawed—elections, citizens could express their views without fear, and more than 700 political parties had been registered.” Yet Freedom House gave Russia a lower rating for political freedom in 2000 than it gave to Kuwait, where political parties are illegal and criticism of the hereditary ruler is punishable by imprisonment.

With a gross domestic product per capita of $8,000, Russia now is like other middle-income democracies, such as Mexico, Malaysia, and Croatia. These democracies “are rough around the edges: Their governments suffer from corruption, their judiciaries are politicized, and their press is almost never entirely free. They have high income inequality, concentrated corporate ownership, and turbulent macroeconomic performance. In all these regards, Russia is quite normal.”

Because Soviet-era data were distorted, today’s harder data exaggerate the perception of decline. During the 1990s, average living standards may even have improved; private ownership of cars nearly doubled (to 27 per 100 households).

Why is there such despair about Russia? In part because the West once saw it as “a highly developed, if not wealthy country.” That it proved otherwise seemed “a disastrous aberration.”