The most important things to remember are: 1) The Putin regime has always been ideologically liberal, no matter which Gref, Kudrin, Illarionov or Nabiullina got the Kremlin migalka on a given week; 2) The Clan War ain’t over, it’s just morphing, as it has for decades and will continue to; 3) "Putin strengthened his position"? That’s supposed to be a revelation? Why blow me down!

First, a word about the supposed "liberal-silovik" battle. A couple of weeks ago I was over at Edward Limonov’s apartment, griping about how Russia’s "liberals" like Yavlinsky, Khakamada, Ryzhkov, Nemtsov and the rest were still incapable of going into hard opposition against the Putin regime. I suggested to Limonov that the liberals wouldn’t break clean because on the one hand, they were hoping that the supposedly-liberal Medvedev might offer them a sweet post, and that on the other hand, the liberals weren’t prepared to risk their bourgeois lifestyles in a confrontation with a much stronger power.

"It’s much more simple than that," Limonov said. "The Putin regime is a liberal regime, so it’s natural that liberals like Khakamada or Nemtsov do not seriously oppose it. Just look at Putin’s economic program: Low taxes, concentration of wealth in oligarchs’ hands, strict budgets. The Kremlin’s ideology is basically the same as that of Nemtsov’s and Khakamada’s, so of course it makes no sense to confront them as my organization does. They can only argue over the details of this liberalism, over who should own what and how it should be implemented."

Limonov is right. Even Putin’s crackdown on democracy follows the script for post-Pinochet liberalism, as Naomi Klein brilliantly showed in her book The Shock Doctrine. Just as Georgia’s leader Mikhail Saakashvili is a liberal, even though he sent his shock troops wilding on opposition protestors, exiled his political opponents and shut down the opposition media. All of this talk of "liberals" on the ascendant or on the decline in the Putin Era is nonsense. Liberals are the Putin Era. And so are the siloviki, who still constitute the same 70-percent of the Russian elite today as they did last week, before their supposed decline. The reason they’re in power isn’t because of some deep ideological desire to create a neo-Fascist state, but rather, because that’s who Putin grew up with, and Putin rules a country steeped in clan culture.

And that brings me to the Clan War, and its supposed ending. First, a little history on the whole "Clan" concept in Russian politics. The tendency in Russia to staff your fiefdom­whether it’s your company department, or your Kremlin vertikalny vlast’­with "svoi" or "your people" isn’t something that just started under Putin, despite the Western media’s late discovery. Indeed the same Russian sociologist whom the Western media relied on to unmask the rise of the siloviki under Putin’s term­Olga Kryshtanovskaya­first coined the expression "The St. Petersburg Clan" back in the mid-1990s, when describing Anatoly Chubais’ powerful clan of free-market loyalists. Difference was, Chubais was our guy, so the media completely ignored Kryshtanovskaya’s damning studies of the original all-powerful, ruthless, venal St. Petersburg Clan.

To see how eerily similar Putin’s Russia today is to Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, read this quote from a 1998 article written by Dr. Janine Wedel, an East Europe expert at George Mason University:

"The St. Petersburg Clan traces its roots to the mid­1980s, to university and club activities in what was then called Leningrad. The chief figure in the group, Anatoly Chubais, is currently the second most powerful man in Russia after President Boris Yeltsin. Chubais was St. Petersburg's deputy mayor [remind you of someone?­Ed.] before being brought to Moscow in 1991 to help execute economic policy.

"…[T]he ‘clan­state’ assumes the communist state's former monopoly on power and control over resources. While occupying multiple institutions, members of the clan maintain dense and multiplex ties. Members of the clan are dispersed, but, as Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya (1997:2) put it, ‘[they] have their men everywhere.’

"…Under the clan­state, the clan uses state resources and authorities (to the extent they can be separately defined in a given instance) but also keeps state authorities far enough away so that they cannot interfere with the clan's acquiring and allocating of resources, but close enough to insure that no rivals can draw on the resources…The strength of the clan lies in its ability to circumvent, connect, override, and otherwise reorganize political and economic institutions and authorities."

And the clan system didn’t start there­Yuri Shchekochikhin, the liberal Duma deputy/Novaya Gazeta muckraker who was poisoned to death in 2003, first made his name in the late 1980s by exposing the Soviet system’s "informal rules of clan logic and the secret prices for all official functions," to quote from an RFE/RL profile.

So when analysts talk about how Russia’s "clan wars" are over, they’re not only freebasing some seriously powerful rock cocaine, they’re also forgetting that a lot of blood has been spilled in the clan turf battle. Kudrin’s former deputy Sergei Storchak is still sitting in jail, growing out his beard like the Unabomber; so are several top-ranking generals from the Anti-Narcotics Committee, who were arrested last fall along with powerful Petersburg businessman/scary-guy Vladimir Barsukov; before them, a number of FSB bigwigs were arrested or fired; and most recently, the powerful Investigative Committee imploded spectacularly with the firings of that organ’s two senior deputies.

In other words, there are a lot of pissed off people out there. They’re not going to abandon the clan culture anytime soon­they’re just going to work the system in what they hope is a more advantageous way.

If you take ideology and simplistic morality out of this clan dynamic, then what you have today is one of those moments in flux, when clans adjust and regroup according to the new dynamic, and reassert themselves as the situation solidifies.

This isn’t a battle between good liberals and bad FSB revanchists. To quote from Zero Effect, "They’re just a bunch of guys." The main difference is one of temperament; some of these guys are scarier than others. But they’re all in it for the same reasons, and they’re all operating under the same rules