All the criticism of Russia's deeply flawed presidential election yesterday misses the point: the election was doubtless a farce, with no serious opposition to the Kremlin's man. But Vladimir Putin deserves credit for doing what no other Russian leader has ever done--he voluntarily ceded power at the height of his political career. Boris Yeltsin's 2000 resignation falls into a different category: there was no way he had the health or popularity to continue. Putin does. So for all the terrible things he has wreaked on Russia during his tenure--dismantling Russia's democracy chief among them--one must at least salute the man for keeping his word and respecting the letter, if not the spirit, of Russia's constitution.

The inheritance which he's passing to Dmitry Medvedev, the unsurprising victor of Sunday's vote by a landslide of over 70%, is a different matter. As this week's Economist argues, there are dark clouds on the economic horizon. Putin's reaped the benefits of three years of meteoric rises in oil and gas prices, which have allowed him the luxury, unknown to politicians in the West, of booming State revenues without any increase in taxation. But the flip side of Russia's oil-fuelled boom has been brutal inflation and a growing poverty gap.

How an exploration of Buddhists' forays into politics led to some surprising discoveries

The idea for the piece that became this week's cover story on Buddhist political activism came to me last fall, when I traveled to Southeast Asia to report on the monk-led "Saffron Revolution" in Burma (also known as Myanmar). The fact that Buddhist monks had decided to put themselves at the head of a Burmese opposition movement against the military junta in their country was intriguing. Because the government was refusing visas to journalists, I ended up doing much of the
reporting out of Bangkok, and along the way I also found myself fascinated by the situation in Thailand, where Buddhism has become an increasingly assertive political force in recent years.

Most people outside of the region probably don't tend to think of Buddhism as a political religion. When westerners think of Buddhists, the image that probably comes to mind most readily involves people sitting in the lotus position, calmly meditating in some blissful spot far-removed from the daily tumult of ordinary life. As one leading scholar, Ian Harris at the UK's University of Cumbria, put it to me, "This idea of the monk withdrawn in contemplation is to some extent an Orientalist construction," a cliché indulged by naïve Westerners. Buddhists, he pointed out, have always been deeply involved in the societies in which they live. In medieval times some served as close advisers to kings, while others fought injustice as warriors. In Southeast Asia monks played a major role in decolonization movements after World War II. Nor are Buddhists always noble oppositionists. In Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam Buddhist clergies are tightly subordinate to local governments, and few among the faithful seem visibly disturbed by the idea. "Monks are people, too," notes Thomas Borchert of the University of Vermont. "They're religion specialists but they're citizens. They may not be able to perform politics in quite the same way as other people, but they're still citizens."

And Buddhism, as a faith struggling to contend with the vagaries of twenty-first century life, is finding itself subject to many of the same pressures as other religions: globalization, and the rapid spread of values, information, and money that goes along with it, is challenging traditional beliefs in Buddhist cultures just as elsewhere. "Buddhist monks have to somehow come to terms with rapid changes," says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of Thailand's leading political analysts. "Some monks carry mobile phones; lots of monks sleep now in air-conditioned monasteries. This is not just Buddhism. You have a lot of religions that have fundamental beliefs challenged by modernity." Last November a Thai bank proposed an "e-merit-making service," offering users convenient, Internet-assisted ways to make donations to their favorite Buddhist cause and thereby reap a bit of positive karma. Thailand now has thousands of Buddhist websites.