The Russian government is passing law after law which essentially seems aimed at either jailing entrepreneurs or hanging the threat of the same over them whenever convenient. For example, anyone who is considered a "foreign currency resident" (this is a concept that no other country has, that I am aware of) has to declare all foreign-currency bank accounts worldwide and regular updates of transactions from them. A "foreign currency resident" is any permanent resident of the Russian Federation as well as any citizen who spends 72 hours or more on the territory of Russia within any calendar year even if residing elsewhere. The goal of the law is to force oligarchs to declare their millions of dollars in Swiss, Cyprus and Latvian bank accounts (or anywhere else, really, but those destinations are popular) so that they can be taxed. However, the unfortunate side effect is that Russians living in the US suddenly become subject to this law if they go visit relatives for short periods of time. It has CRIMINAL penalties for non-compliance, by the way.

The effect of this and similar measures is to make it harder for small businesses to start and grow, which then in turn allows the government to say it's forced to step in to prop up state-run enterprises or enterprises in which the state has a significant minority interest, because the private sector is not strong enough. At the same time, the private sector would be stronger if the government didn't impose crushing regulations on it.

Essentially, the issue isn't that Russia has tightened controls, even. It's that I don't see any attempt at shifting society to a different model of governance that is not premised on massive state intrusion into the private sector. This model, by the way, predates the Soviet experiment. Deng Xiaoping crushed the Tiananmen demonstrators, but at the same time he was liberalizing the economy, and the expectation was that over time, there would be a trend to liberalization. Some of the recent criticism of China is that we haven't seen as much as we would like. In Russia, we haven't seen ANY liberalization. I don't care if Russia wants to be a "great power" again. In fact, I think it's probably better for the US because it will rein in some of the arrogance we've started to have about the right to dictate anything to anyone, an imperial mindset that sees us waste trillions of dollars on a periphery we do not control while our center becomes more and more economically hollow. That bothers me because it undermines us from within.

The problem that I have with Russia is that Putin needs to pass laws that are not just designed to either benefit a small circle of his friends or allow him to have a mechanism to throw people in jail arbitrarily, or both.

By the way, for the record I will say that I'm not particularly worried about Russia's "gay propaganda" laws, either. In larger cities plenty of people are open about their sexuality. It's just that Russia isn't where Western Europe or the US is on the subject. Honestly, Russia is not far from where many conservative US states are on the issue, and they've come a long way from the Soviet days. We just expect them to be where we are now, rather than where we were 20 years ago.