A classic case of what the late Harvard University political theorist Samuel Huntington called "performance legitimacy," Putin's regime enjoyed widespread acceptance so long as income was growing by leaps and bounds. Putin's "authoritarian modernization" was in large measure inspired and justified by China's spectacular growth. But the Russian version of the "Chinese miracle" has been revealed to be yet another Potemkin village. For many Russian writers, thinkers, and activists struggling to understand the legacy of Putinism, there has been too much "authoritarianism" and precious little "modernization." As one of the most perceptive-and brilliantly sarcastic-Russian commentators, Yulia Latynina, has explained, in China the state tells entrepreneurs: Go ahead, get rich, and if there is a bureaucrat who bothers you, we will wring his neck. In Russia, the state tells bureaucrats: Go ahead, get rich, and if there is an entrepreneur who balks at the arrangement, we will bash his head in.Who is to blame? Following this narrative, it is the fusion of private property and power, unprecedented in Russian history, that brought the crash. This is what Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center meant when he wrote that those who rule Russia today also own Russia. From such a state has come a "boundlessly corrupt" economy "without competition, laws, and public oversight," argued Nikolai Zlobin, a columnist for the most respected independent Russian business daily, Vedomosti.