The article calling Kirgizstan "the only democracy in the region" was already a massive red flag considering that Kirgizstan of all countries in the region is the most heavily infected by liberalism and the various NGO tentacles of imperialism, but to see that they also call for a so-called "democratic transition" in Russia - which is code for liberal regime change - instead of a socialist revival really seals the deal in my mind of who they are and what their agenda is. Russia is a bourgeois state and no bourgeois state can be a democratic representative of the proletariat, but all things considered it is more democratic than most western countries, their government has one of the highest approval ratings of any bourgeois democracy and for fairly good reason, though the oligarchs have not been eliminated they have been seriously reigned in by the state over the past 20 years, and conditions enormously improved from the disastrous '90s period. Their talk of the need for a strong state rings particularly hollow because Russia already has that, it could not have done the things it has if it didn't: it exerts significant control over the economy through a state owned military industrial sector and state owned resource extraction, not to mention state predominance in the banking sector. What Russia needs is for that state to become a proletarian one again.

Of course reading the author's "credentials" it becomes clear why they talk this way. "OpenDemocracy" in particular should raise huge warning signs for anyone, it is another one of those "democracy and human rights" billionaire funded liberal orgs that propagandize against the enemies of western imperialism.

What these sorts of people want is for all states to be structured like western liberal democracies because that is the structure that is maximally adapted to enable smooth control of all facets of society by the bourgeoisie while maintaining the facade of "democracy". It demobilizes radicalism like no other structure that has even been invented.