Putin's new vision of 'Eurasia'

But there is another audience for Putin's bravado that the West remains at best dimly aware of - the post-Soviet space. And it is here that his efforts have deeper resonance than most Western observers understand.

In May 2005 while President Putin told Russians that the collapse of the Soviet empire "was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," leaving the denizens of the fourteen other nations to emerge from the Soviet debris field wondering exactly what he meant.

On 4 October Putin suggested that ex-Soviet states form a "Eurasian Union" in an article which outlined his first foreign policy initiative as he prepares to return to the Russian presidency, commenting that the organization would build on an existing Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan which beginning in 2012 will remove all barriers to trade, capital and labor movement between the three countries.

Needless to say, Putin's suggestion has unsettled conservatives worldwide, who believe that he is trying to reassemble the Soviet Union by stealth.

A more dispassionate view of Putin's proposal indicates that it actually contains more than a modicum of sense.

First, except for economists of the Soviet era, few understand that the collapse of the USSR tore apart a country where economic development was geared to the union as a whole, rather than its constituent republics. To give but one example - all the electric meters for buildings were produced in Lithuania, so after 1991, a Kazakh, Azeri, Russian or Kyrgyz constructing a building and wanting to measure its electrical usage had to deal with - Lithuania.

Given the way that resources, both natural and man-made were distributed across the USSR, the collapse of the country produced consequences which are still playing out.

Secondly, it is more than passing strange that Western capitalists, fierce advocates of "free trade," should see a darker purpose in Putin's suggestion - after all, NAFTA in the Western Hemisphere and the EU have developed similar trading principles. In NAFTA, the U.S. is obviously the dominant power, and Germany occupies a similar economic position in the EU, yet few argue that either is seeking to dominate its fellow states.

Last but not least, the reality for the bulk of the post-Soviet space, and including the USSR's former protectorate over Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation remains Eurasia's dominant energy superpower, with the exceptions of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and only Azerbaijan has managed to wiggle out from under Moscow's thumb for its energy exports to the West.

And even those are subject to Russia's pressures, as the brief August 2009 Russo-Georgian war indicated.

The economic integration of the European Union has hardly led to increased military tensions between EU members - accordingly, for Western observers, they should at least adopt a 'wait and see" attitude towards Putin's "Eurasian" suggestions, as closer economic integration could in fact benefit former Soviet states who sign up.

But, at the end of the day, Western negativity towards the proposal may well be grounded in fears that Western investors may find the dynamics of the playing fields in the post-soviet space shifting. The litmus test in the case will be Kazakhstan, whose booming energy sector in the last two decades has attracted more than $120 billion in foreign investment, and whose President Nursultan Nazarbayev had given his support to the "union."