By the time Putin became president, he was well acquainted with the double standards of Western democracies, which preached liberal values at home but were very happy to help build illiberal regimes everywhere else. In his first decade in office, he did the same, using the slogans of democracy, even as he built what eventually became a dictatorship. In an address to the nation in 2000, he declared that “only a democratic state is capable of ensuring a balance of interests of the individual and society, combining private initiative with national goals.” In 2002, he said that a democratic state
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