The age-old problem for Russia is, how to run a territory sprawling over some eleven time zones?

This means Moscow catching the attention of regional leaders thousands of miles away – and keeping them in reasonable line.

Over the years a Firm Hand has been seen as the best method. But is it best suited to the needs of a modern economy? And, if not, what?

Igor Yurgens, said to be close to President Medvedev has views:

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Mr Yurgens said Mr Putin had put power in the hands of a small ruling elite, creating an energy-dependent model that was beginning to creak as the financial crisis began to weaken Russia.

"The present system shows signs of overextension," Mr Yurgens said. "It shows signs of over centralisation and fragility because it is based not on institutions but on the mythological vertical of power.

"The reform process stumbled halfway. We have to push very hard to restart those reforms otherwise we will not be ready to catch up with the G8. We will remain on the level of leading emerging nations."

"The mythological vertical of power".

What a phrase.

Leonid Khrushchev died in WW2. His father of course was the former Soviet leader, famous for the not-so Secret Speech in 1956 which confronted the Party with the crimes of Stalin. And for airing his sock at the UN.

Was Leonid a hero or traitor? Whichever he was, that by implication is how is father will be seen. And how he is seen shapes the legitimacy or not of Stalin and Stalinism and attempts to move away from it now. Obvious, huh?

To see how these high-level power struggles in part play out in popular Russian consciousness, read this outstanding article:

Khrushchev, who had planted the seedling of the Soviet demise, quietly and almost magically morphed into a force for bad, the antithesis of what the new leadership represented, which meant that he would have to be countered, undermined, repudiated: if one wanted to curry favour with the Kremlin one might train his sights on Nikita Sergeyevich, in a book, a newspaper, maybe on a nationally broadcast television programme.

This was never stated, of course. There were no memos or secret speeches. Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev would never deign to get involved in this sort of thing.

The best recent example of this two-step process – in which the leader signals some vague wish or discontent and his minions subsequently bend over backward to fulfil that wish or correct the perceived injustice – was on display in Putin’s remarks at a June 2007 conference of high-school teachers in Moscow.

As the historian Orlando Figes recounts in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Putin denounced the “mess and confusion” that had afflicted the teaching of Russian history. Four days after the conference, the Duma introduced a law, which was quickly passed, giving the Ministry of Education the right to choose which textbooks should be published and used in Russian schools. Government officials at the conference promoted – and soon adopted – a textbook whose main author, Alexander Filippov, was the employee of a pro-Kremlin think-tank.

The office of the president, which commissioned the book, had issued instructions to Filippov and his co-authors to portray Stalin as “good” (because he “strengthened vertical power”), Khrushchev as “bad” (“weakened vertical power”), and Brezhnev as “good” (“for the same reasons as Stalin”).

“That is the nature of the secretive and despotic system,” says Nina Khrushcheva, Yulia’s daughter and an international-relations professor at The New School in New York. “The tsar doesn’t need to give orders. There are a lot of bureaucratic well-wishers who think, ‘I’m sure he’d love it. The tsar would appreciate what I do.’”

In other words, the campaign to defame Leonid Khrushchev and Nikita Khrushchev and the whole liberal project was understood, the way so many things in Russia are understood, by Russians, if not by anyone else.

Superb. Read the whole thing.