Under Venediktov’s canny direction, the main presenters for Echo have developed an ear for what is permissible and what is not. “You can call Putin or Medvedev a fool, which, of course, was totally impossible in Soviet times, but you might get into trouble if you look into their pockets,” Albats said. “You cannot say you’ve heard that So-and-So has sent x trillion dollars to this or that offshore account. These people are total conformists, total pragmatists, they have no interest at all in ideology. They care about their power and their assets [bold mine-DL].” ~David Remnick

Via James

That is the essential difference between the old system and Putinism.  That isn’t to say that Soviet leaders didn’t care about their power, but there was an ideological dimension to their attempts to control society that made it very different.  This is one of several reasons why people who warn about “Sovietization” or a neo-Soviet empire today are utterly wrong, and it is why a Putinist Russia is even more manageable than the old USSR.  Far from being the “unpredictable” danger that alarmists want to make it out to be, Russia is quite understandable and predictable.  It is clear what Russia wants and that its objectives are fairly limited.  The less complaining about “archaic” spheres of influence we hear from the people who treat the entire globe as their sphere of influence, the better the chances of a thaw in U.S.-Russian relations.