Chrystia Freeland

Chrystia Freeland is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are her own.

The Russians are coming. So far, the invaders are both welcome and unexpected — these aren’t the Cold War comrades who aspired to geopolitical domination or the first wave of oligarchs with their treasure chest of natural resources. These Russians propose to conquer the world’s new frontier — the Internet — and they are every bit as cocky as their forebears.

Russia’s arrival as a would-be technology superpower was announced this week when Yandex, a Russian Internet search company, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the biggest U.S. Internet listing since Google went public in 2004.

With characteristic Russian bravado, Ilya Segalovich, the company’s chief technology officer, told my colleagues Alina Selyukh and Megan Davies that Yandex was superior to the behemoth Google: “Google is a great company, but we are better.” Yandex is “very focused on what we are doing, and the focus is technology and search.”

If you think of Russia either as the land of KGB-style repression or that of yacht-owning, supermodel-dating oil-rich oligarchs, this claim to technological prowess will be surprising. But ever since imperial Russia’s scientific modernization campaign, Russians have prided themselves on their mathematical and engineering skills — remember Sputnik.

For Yandex’s chief executive, Arkady Volozh, that human capital gives Russia the potential to emerge as a technology superpower. “Russia is famous for its resources,” he said. “But Russia also has a lot of talent.” He added, “Russia deserves to have a technology company of a global level.”

Silicon Valley has understood Russia’s technological savvy for some time. Right now, the Valley’s hottest investor hails not from Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the region’s famous venture capital community, but from Moscow. Yuri Milner was such an aggressive and pioneering supporter of companies like Facebook and Zynga that he earned his way onto the Forbes billionaire list this year and has an investing approach (lots of cash, no board seat) named after him. Soon, Mr. Milner will be a physical presence, too — last month, he paid a reported $100 million for an estate in Los Altos Hills in the Valley, though he and his family will continue to make Moscow their main home.

Another sign that the smart money in America thinks we could be at the crest of a Russian technology wave: Earlier this year, New York-based General Atlantic, a fund with extensive emerging market and technology expertise, invested $200 million in Kaspersky Lab, a producer of security and anti-virus software. That was one of the flashiest foreign direct investments in Russian technology to date and paves the way for another Russian technology offering in three to five years.

All of this is very good news for the Kremlin, particularly its chief, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose big campaign at the moment is an economic modernization drive. Its centerpiece is a plan to build a Russian version of Silicon Valley in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow known as Skolkovo.

That effort tends to provoke skepticism among Russians, who have a cultural affinity for cynicism, particularly when it comes to their government. But even if you aren’t a world-weary Slav, there are good reasons to wonder whether Putin’s Russia can conquer the Internet.

After all, in the great debate about the social effects of digital technology, the Arab Spring has provided pretty powerful evidence that new media and old dictators don’t mix. If you are unconvinced, ask the Chinese comrades, whose fear of Tunisian contagion prompted them not merely to block online references to the Jasmine Revolution, but also to ban the sale of the flower itself.

Those repressive reflexes have prompted many of the digerati to question, at least in private, whether authoritarian regimes can ever permit the free-spirited, open-ended, often frankly rebellious style of thinking and working that innovating on the Internet requires. Dictatorships might be good at manufacturing iPads — but could they invent them?

In the case of Russia, we may be discovering that authoritarianism and invention can coexist more easily than liberal democrats might hope. That is largely because Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s genius has been to devise a form of government you might call authoritarianism lite. State rule in Russia isn’t exactly soft — just ask Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, whose conviction on embezzlement charges was upheld by a Moscow court this week — but it isn’t Big Brother either.

In the world of ideas, Mr. Putin has understood the state doesn’t need to rule everything — only the mass, opinion-forming media, which in Russia is broadcast TV. On the radio, in elite newspapers and on the Internet, the intelligentsia can say pretty much what it chooses. This isn’t entirely new for Russia — both tsars and commissars allowed the intelligentsia some latitude, on the theory the chattering class didn’t really count. But Mr Putin has taken this much further than the apparatchiks did, allowing, for instance, extensive foreign travel.

As the Russian journalist Valery Panyushkin wrote in a New York Times op-ed article, “In Russia today, journalists are murdered like Anna Politkovskaya, beaten like Oleg Kashin and intimidated like me, but — as terrible as this will sound — that is not the real problem. The real problem is that journalists are ignored.”

The Kremlin has done a similar deal with its oligarchs. They can be rich — as long as they don’t seek to influence how their country is ruled, which in Mr. Putin’s eyes was Mr. Khodorkovsky’s true crime.

These two bargains — freedom and political impotence for the intelligentsia; wealth and political impotence for the oligarchs — are Mr. Putin’s version of the social contract. For Russia’s rising technology elite, that fragile combination of personal liberty and a lot of money may be good enough.

The Russians are coming. So far, the invaders are both welcome and unexpected — these aren’t the Cold War comrades who aspired to geopolitical domination or the first wave of oligarchs with their treasure chest of natural resources. These Russians propose to conquer the world’s new frontier — the Internet — and they are every bit as cocky as their forebears.

Russia’s arrival as a would-be technology superpower was announced this week when Yandex, a Russian Internet search company, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the biggest U.S. Internet listing since Google went public in 2004.

With characteristic Russian bravado, Ilya Segalovich, the company’s chief technology officer, told my colleagues Alina Selyukh and Megan Davies that Yandex was superior to the behemoth Google: “Google is a great company, but we are better.” Yandex is “very focused on what we are doing, and the focus is technology and search.”

If you think of Russia either as the land of K.G.B.-style repression or that of yacht-owning, supermodel-dating oil-rich oligarchs, this claim to technological prowess will be surprising. But ever since imperial Russia’s scientific modernization campaign, Russians have prided themselves on their mathematical and engineering skills — remember Sputnik.

For Yandex’s chief executive, Arkady Volozh, that human capital gives Russia the potential to emerge as a technology superpower. “Russia is famous for its resources,” he said. “But Russia also has a lot of talent.” He added, “Russia deserves to have a technology company of a global level.”

Silicon Valley has understood Russia’s technological savvy for some time. Right now, the Valley’s hottest investor hails not from Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the region’s famous venture capital community, but from Moscow. Yuri Milner was such an aggressive and pioneering supporter of companies like Facebook and Zynga that he earned his way onto the Forbes billionaire list this year and has an investing approach (lots of cash, no board seat) named after him. Soon, Mr. Milner will be a physical presence, too: Last month, he paid a reported $100 million for an estate in Los Altos Hills in the Valley, though he and his family will continue to make Moscow their main home.

Another sign that the smart money in America thinks we could be at the crest of a Russian technology wave: Earlier this year, the New York-based General Atlantic, a fund with extensive emerging market and technology expertise, invested $200 million in Kaspersky Lab, a maker of security software. That was one of the flashiest foreign direct investments in Russian technology to date and paves the way for another Russian technology offering in three to five years.

All of this is good news for the Kremlin, particularly President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose big campaign at the moment is a modernization drive. Its centerpiece is a plan to build a Russian version of Silicon Valley in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow known as Skolkovo. That effort tends to provoke skepticism among Russians, who have an affinity for cynicism, particularly when it comes to their government. But even if you aren’t a world-weary Slav, there are reasons to wonder if Russia can conquer the Internet.

After all, in the great debate about the social effects of digital technology, the Arab Spring has provided pretty powerful evidence that new media and old dictators don’t mix. If you are unconvinced, ask the Chinese comrades, whose fear of Tunisian contagion prompted them not merely to block online references to the Jasmine Revolution, but also to ban the sale of the flower.

Those repressive reflexes have prompted many of the digerati to question, at least in private, whether authoritarian regimes can ever permit the free-spirited, open-ended, often frankly rebellious style of thinking and working that innovating on the Internet requires. Dictatorships might be good at manufacturing iPads — but could they invent them?

In the case of Russia, we may be discovering that authoritarianism and invention can coexist more easily than liberal democrats might hope. That is largely because Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s genius has been to devise a form of government you might call authoritarianism lite. State rule in Russia isn’t exactly soft — just ask Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, whose conviction on embezzlement charges was upheld by a Moscow court this week — but it isn’t Big Brother either.

In the world of ideas, Mr. Putin has understood the state doesn’t need to rule everything — only the mass, opinion-forming media, which in Russia is broadcast TV. On the radio, in elite newspapers and on the Internet, the intelligentsia can say pretty much what it chooses. This isn’t entirely new for Russia: Both czars and commissars allowed the intelligentsia some latitude, on the theory that the chattering class didn’t really count. But Mr. Putin has taken this much further than the apparatchiks did, allowing, for instance, extensive foreign travel.

As the Russian journalist Valery Panyushkin wrote in a New York Times op-ed article, “In Russia today, journalists are murdered like Anna Politkovskaya, beaten like Oleg Kashin and intimidated like me, but — as terrible as this will sound — that is not the real problem. The real problem is that journalists are ignored.”

The Kremlin has done a similar deal with its oligarchs. They can be rich, so long as they don’t seek to influence how their country is ruled.

These two bargains — freedom and political impotence for the intelligentsia; wealth and political impotence for the oligarchs — are Mr. Putin’s version of the social contract. For Russia’s rising technology elite, that fragile combination of personal liberty and a lot of money may be good enough.

In the ‘‘Take Back the Night’’ marches I walked in in high school and college, one of my favorite chants was this one: ‘‘Whatever I wear, wherever I go, yes means yes and no means no.’’ That jingle was invented to popularize one of the most radical and important ideas of the second-wave feminists — that rape and promiscuity were entirely separate issues.

Some of the reaction to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges of attempted rape and sexual assault is making the same dangerous mistake of blurring the distinction between licentiousness and coercion — between sex, and sexual assault.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s philandering — and indeed his infidelity — are not in dispute. Like Newt Gingrich, his current wife is his third, and just three years ago he had to publicly apologize to the International Monetary Fund for his ‘‘error in judgment’’ in having an affair with Piroska Nagy, a subordinate. That shameful act wasn’t a sexual assault, but it was what most of us (though not the I.M.F. board) would call sexual harassment. People close to Ms. Nagy say that the affair was consensual but that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s position as her ultimate boss made his advances inappropriate. As Ms. Nagy wrote in a letter to a law firm hired by the I.M.F. to investigate the affair, ‘‘I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.’’

But it is a grave and dangerous mistake, with particularly baleful consequences for women, to argue that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s history as a seducer, including in the workplace, makes him a more plausible rapist — even if, in the end, he does turn out to be guilty.

Yet that is what many of us are doing in the stunned aftermath to the Saturday arrest. The loudest culprits are an unlikely alliance of triumphant Anglo- Saxon puritans, feminists and the tabloid wing of the press. All of them are drawing a connecting line between Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s documented promiscuity and the allegation that he attempted rape and committed sexual assault last Saturday.

Speaking for Albion, a columnist in The Times of London this week happily declared, ‘‘The British may be too prudish about sexual behavior, but the Strauss-Kahn scandal shows that French fascination with political seducers may be at least equally misguided.’’

Even the French, who have long prided themselves on their tolerant cultural attitude toward the personal affairs of their leaders, have begun to question that national permissiveness.

But the thinking underlying all of these critiques — that a history of promiscuity and adultery is relevant to the current charges of rape and sexual assault — is as flawed as the old and discredited belief that ‘‘loose’’ women could not be raped. When it comes to women and victims, we have spent decades insisting — rightly — that there is a world of difference between consensual sex and forced sex, and the credibility and the authority of a woman’s right to say no is in no way diminished by the number of times she may have said yes in the past.

It is equally mistaken to imagine that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s history of consensual promiscuity has any bearing on the charges he now faces. Neither logic nor the facts suggest that men in sexually permissive cultures are more likely to be rapists than men in repressive ones, nor that such cultures are more misogynist or more dangerous to women.

Consider this: There were few places on earth where it was worse to be a woman, and where women had less control over their own bodies, than in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The Roman Catholic Church deems homosexuality to be a sin and its priests take vows of celibacy, yet that has not prevented an epidemic of abuse.

(Indeed, if you are feeling contrarian, you could turn the whole argument upside down and contend that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s form as a Lothario makes him an unlikely rapist: why force a woman to have sex, when he seemed to have little trouble finding willing partners? But, of course, that defense is as invalid as the accusations based on past sexual behavior, because it makes the same mistake of putting rape and consensual sex in the same category.)

That is why there is one ugly allegation about Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s personal history that does matter — the claim by the journalist and writer Tristane Banon that he sexually assaulted her and tried to rape her during an interview in 2002. Ms. Banon’s lawyer said this week that she now planned to file a legal complaint against him. In all we have learned about Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s amorous history over the past few days, and of France’s cultural tolerance, this is the one episode that could matter.

Most feminists seem deeply unconcerned by the puritanical undertones to much of the analysis of the Strauss- Kahn case. That is a miscalculation.

One of the most important victories of modern feminism is drawing a very clear distinction between sexual ‘‘virtue’’ and sexual assault. The law sees no difference between raping a prostitute and raping a virgin. A husband who forces his wife to have sex commits a crime; a married woman who has an affair does not. France tolerates its philandering politicians. That has absolutely no relevance to the crime he is accused of committing in New York.

Roger Martin is an unlikely revolutionary: He is the dean of the Rotman School of Management, the business school at the University of Toronto, he sits on blue-chip corporate boards, and he has worked as a consultant for big, traditional companies like Procter & Gamble and General Motors. All in all, very much the résumé of a pillar of the corporate establishment. (Disclosure: I am a member of the Rotman School’s advisory board.)

But this month, Martin has published a book whose gentle tone belies its seditious content. Here’s what is radical about Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn From the N.F.L.: Instead of asking how businesses can organize themselves to be more effective and more profitable for their shareholders, Martin wants to figure out how society should organize business to be more effective for all of us.

The corporate intelligentsia — business school professors, management consultants and many of us scribblers and squawkers of the business press — focus nearly all of their attention on the first question. That is a perfectly worthy subject. Indeed, the huge and continuing improvements in business productivity over the past 200 years have made more of us richer and healthier than human beings of the previous two millennia could have imagined.

That’s why there is such an avid audience for thinking about how to run your business — whether it is a public company, a start-up or your own career — better. And this type of work has the further virtue, for both its practitioners and its users, of not really threatening anyone. It is technocratic, not political, and it often offers the additional feel-good fillip of a practical path toward improvement. It is a universe of engaging stories and ultimately uncontentious outcomes — think of the wildly popular oeuvre of Malcolm Gladwell.

Even the harder edge of the business commentariat — muckraking journalists, for example — operates largely within this paradigm. The questions we usually ask are about whether laws were broken or investors were deceived.

But the business world also presents an entirely different set of issues: how well the existing rules are working for the common good. This is a deeply political question, and it is a central preoccupation of politicians and policy makers.

But inside the business community? Not so much. That is more than a shame. It is dangerous, because surely the lesson of 2008, and maybe even of 2001, is that the U.S. version of capitalism contains some serious systemic flaws.

The power of Martin’s book is that he steps outside of our existing paradigm to ask whether the rules of the game are working for the system as a whole. That’s a departure for Martin, whose previous writing and consulting work was mostly from the more traditional — and safer — perspective of how to make your company work better within the existing order. Venturing onto this more controversial terrain is a risk for Martin, and he knows it.

“This book represents a departure from my previous three books in that they were largely devoid of criticism,” Martin writes. “In this book, I am critical of some institutions (for example, hedge funds). However, I want to be clear that I bear no ill will to the people inside them.”

That final sentence is sure to enrage the guillotine crowd, whose chief complaint about the aftermath of the financial crisis is that not enough of the guilty have been punished. If that is your view, Martin’s discomfort about naming and shaming may seem like a cop-out.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth. While Martin’s approach may be less viscerally satisfying, it is actually more radical. The central insight of his book is that the rules of capitalism aren’t about God-given rights à la Hayek, Ayn Rand or the Tea Party. They are a social construct, and it is the right — indeed the duty — of society to ensure that they are working for the common good.

Martin’s unifying metaphor — and here I do see a reach for the best-seller list — is a comparison with the National Football League. The league’s commissioners, he argues, are constantly tweaking the rules of the game to ensure the right collective outcome. When a brilliant coach or player devises a technique to strengthen defense, for instance, the commissioners alter the rules to offset that advantage. Capitalism’s rule makers, Martin believes, must be likewise perpetually alert to these sorts of business innovations — the kind of thing lionized in the traditional business advice best seller — and change the rules of the game to neutralize their impact.

Martin has stuck to the business book convention in one way — notwithstanding his jabs at a few business titans (notably Jack Welch of General Electric and the hedge-fund giant Stevie Cohen), his is ultimately a sunny, can-do tone. “In doing so, we can restore the core of business and capitalism.  We can fix the game — until the next time we need to tweak it!” he concludes with a jaunty exclamation point.

Those of a more skeptical bent should follow Martin’s book by reading an essay by Tyler Cowen, the prolific and provocative libertarian economist, published earlier this year. His theme is income inequality, and he concludes with the scary thought that the rise of the knowledge economy, and of superstar salaries for its gladiators, may mean that the players will permanently outfox those charged with tweaking the rules to keep them in check.

“It is naïve to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law,” Mr. Cowen writes. “That’s an underappreciated way to think about our modern, wealthy economy: Smart people have greater reach than ever before, and nothing really can go so wrong for them. As a broad-based portrait of the new world, that sounds pretty good, and usually it is. Just keep in mind that every now and then those smart people will be making — collectively — some pretty big mistakes.”

Good luck mustering the political will to keep them in check.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Now it is time for the peace dividend. That’s a phrase you may remember from the early 1990s, when Soviet Communism, the big existential threat of the second half of the 20th century, collapsed. Today, America needs a peace dividend even more than it did 20 years ago. But cashing it in will be a challenge.

That’s partly because, as in 1991, the death of Bin Laden should be the trigger for a much broader rethinking of U.S. foreign policy. That will be tough to initiate. Since 1941, the United States has defined its role in the world largely in opposition to an unambiguously evil foreign enemy: first the Axis powers, then the Soviet bloc, and, for the past decade, Al Qaeda and its allies.

This kind of foreign policy was expensive — but it had the virtue of intellectual and moral clarity. One measure of how comforting this Manichean approach was came from the speed with which the threat posed by Al Qaeda came to be equated with the dangers of Soviet Communism.

Recall an important essay published in January 2002, by Daniel Pipes, titled “Who is the Enemy?” Pipes is literally, as well as figuratively, a son of the Cold War warriors — his father is Richard Pipes, the eminent Russian historian and one of the seminal theorists of totalitarianism and its baleful international impact.

For Pipes fils, radical Islam was the 21st century’s version of Soviet totalitarianism, and it was every bit as dangerous. In his Commentary essay Pipes approvingly quoted the view of Willy Claes, secretary general of NATO in the mid-1990s, that “not only did militant Islam pose the same kind of threat to the West as Communism before it, but the scale of the danger was greater.”

Pipes went on to explain: “The situation, then, is grim. But it is not hopeless, any more than the situation at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union was hopeless. What is required, now as then, is not just precision and honesty in defining the enemy but conceptual clarity in confronting it.”

Even in January 2002, with the horror of the Sept. 11 attack fresh in American minds, that equation of the danger posed by the scraggly, stateless guerillas of Al Qaeda with the nuclear-armed, oil-rich, territorially vast Soviet bloc was a stretch. Today, with bin Laden killed in a commando raid and with tweeting democrats on the rise in much of the Muslim world, the fear that militant Islam was this century’s version of Bolshevism seems even more far-fetched.

Instead, when the euphoria over bin Laden’s death subsides, Americans will realize the foreign policy challenge this generation faces is not quite as extreme, but much more intellectually complex. American foreign policy today cannot be defined by the fight against a single, ideologically clear, enemy.

Instead, the United States faces the much murkier job of helping to figure out the rules of a new world order that is governed neither by a single, dominant hyperpower — as in the Pax Romana, or the brief, sole reign of the United States in the ’90s — nor by the balance of power created by dueling superpowers.

The big international questions in this new, multipolar world are economic: Now that the superpowers aren’t duking it out for global supremacy, the bloodiest power struggles are within countries, not between blocs. But what we haven’t figured out yet is how to manage economic relations between one another.

America is, at least for now, still the world’s largest economy, and, more than any other, it is the country whose economic system has served as a model for everyone else. So it is inevitable — and essential — that the United States should play a leading role in today’s pre-eminent foreign policy challenge of sorting out a new global economic order.

But there are two big obstacles to that sort of energetic, international U.S. economic leadership. The first is America’s massive deficit and government debt — it is hard to be a leader when you are in the red. The second is the enfeebled state of the nation’s middle class. The United States is a true people’s democracy, and it works best when Main Street is prospering. That’s not the case today.

That’s where the peace dividend comes in. America will be the real winner from the killing of Bin Laden if his death can be the beginning of the end of the war on terror and the start of a focus on the problems of the world economy, and the effort to find the right place for America within it.

But performing that pivot won’t be easy. After World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the political perils of what he dubbed the military-industrial complex: “The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.”

He concluded: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

The war on terror has its own military-industrial-intellectual complex and already its advocates are insisting that bin Laden’s death does not kill the threat posed by militant Islam. Speaking on CNN earlier this week, Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of Defense, warned: “I think OBL will be replaced by a successor. And if we capture and kill the successor, that individual will be replaced. The people are determined. They’re vicious.”

One reason Americans are rejoicing this week is because it is nice to have such dramatic evidence that their state can be competent. An even tougher mission for that state will be to use this week’s military triumph to position the country for long-term economic success.

Watch Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein explain to Chrystia why there’s greater political risk in the United States than in the emerging markets; how he gets a better reception from Chinese Communist Party cadres in Beijing than his own members of Congress in Washington; how private-equity firms can help remedy the impending entitlement crisis; and how the procedure that enacts Congressional salary increases can be adopted to cut the deficit.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.