Leaders of the Group of Eight agreed in 2002 that Russia should host next week's summit of the club of industrialised democracies, hoping that would send two messages to the world. First, Russia was pulling out of its deep, post-Soviet economic tailspin. Second, it was firmly embedded in the western family of nations.
St Petersburg will provide an effective backdrop for the first message. Like other big cities in today's oil-rich Russia, it is booming - its roads relaid, its baroque palaces regilded. The summit will also demonstrate that Russia once again has a seat at the world's top table.
Yet, far from showing how close its relations are with its European and US partners, Russia's G8 presidency has highlighted how far Russia remains apart. It has been marred by bickering with the European Union over energy and mounting mutual suspicion with the US on democracy issues. On the other hand, it has seen further signs of President Vladimir Putin's embrace of China, as he signed a deal in March to supply billions of dollars' worth of gas.
Talk of a new Sino-Russian axis, a new clash between democratic and authoritarian camps, even a new cold war, may be exaggerated: Moscow is no longer peddling a hostile, expansionist ideology. But hopes that Russia would become anchored in the western community have, for now, evaporated.
"Moscow has left the western orbit and set out in free flight," says Dmitry Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a liberal think-tank.
Mr Trenin says the west bears some responsibility. Russia has watched Nato and the EU expand to its doorstep without being offered a realistic chance of joining. Attempts to woo first the US after September 11 2001, then the states of "old Europe" that opposed the Iraq war, were not rewarded with the partnership of equals that Moscow craved.
Others add that unquestioning European and US support for Russia's ultimately flawed 1990s market reforms - which left millions worse off in a chaotic state largely controlled by a handful of super-rich "oligarchs" - helped discredit the west and its values for many Russians.
Mr Putin's team came to power in 2000 with little programme beyond restoring order. But in recent months senior officials - notably Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's deputy chief of staff and in-house ideologist - have spelt out a vision of Russia's future and place in the world.
That vision contains commitments to democracy (albeit moulded to Russia's needs) and European values. But it is also shot through with suspicion bordering on paranoia about the west and its motives, expressed just as forcefully as recent US criticism of Russia. At its heart is what Mr Surkov calls "sovereign democracy", roughly translatable as "We'll do it our way".
Russia is a European country, Mr Surkov says. But its future is as an independent state, not part of a transnational structure such as the EU. It is a democracy, but on its own terms. United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party that controls two-thirds of the seats in Russia's parliament, must dominate for at least 10-15 years, Mr Surkov told party activists in February, to prevent any return of the 1990s oligarchy or victory for "isolationist" nationalists. He compared this with the way Japan's Liberal Democratic party or Sweden's Social Democrats ruled for four decades or more.
This sovereign and vast Russia, straddling Europe and Asia, sees for itself a correspondingly central role in world affairs. And here Russia's leaders identify the main reason for increased western sniping.
"To be honest, not everyone was ready to see Russia begin to restore its economic health and its position on the international stage so rapidly," Mr Putin told Russian ambassadors gathered in Moscow last week. "Some still see . . . a strong and reinvigorated Russia as a threat."
Revitalised Russia, its leaders insist, is not a threat. But neither is it a special friend to the west. Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister, wrote in Moscow News in March that Russia believed in applying the same principles of co-operation to all partners - be they former Soviet republics, China, India, the US or Europe. Russia sees itself as a pole in a "multi-polar" world, aimed above all at counterbalancing US might. It deeply distrusts the Bush administration's policy of spreading democracy as a global panacea.
"Russia, from its own history, remembers very well the obsessive idée fixe of changing the world," Mr Lavrov wrote, "and cannot subscribe to analogous projects being put forward today, whatever they are called - global advancement of freedom and democracy or 'transformative diplomacy'."
Senior officials make clear Russia views US-backed "orange" revolutions in former Soviet states such as Ukraine and Georgia not as spreading democracy but as anti-constitutional coups designed to advance western influence in Moscow's own backyard. It believes the west will try to pull off the same trick in Russia itself in parliamentary elections next year and a presidential contest in 2008.
Alongside international terrorism, Mr Surkov told United Russia activists, a fundamental threat to sovereignty was "a soft takeover" by "orange technologies".
As Mr Putin made clear last week, Russia sees a more existential threat as a clash of civilisations between the Muslim and Christian worlds - given Russia's more than 15m-strong Muslim population. Hence its insistence that the crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions - like any international crisis - must be solved by compromise and diplomacy. Russia is determined to prevent a repeat of the Iraq war.
But Moscow believes the main form of 21st-century competition with developed countries will not be military but economic. Mr Surkov argues that behind the hype, globalisation is the old struggle for influence in a different guise. "For all globalisation's benefits, all the talk of friendship, the Americans count their dividends at home, the British count theirs . . . and we count ours, while the majority count their losses," he told United Russia. "So when they tell us sovereignty is outdated, as is the nation state, we should ask ourselves what they're up to."
Russia's strategy for holding its own in the global economic race is to become an "energy superpower". Dmitry Medvedev, first deputy prime minister and a front-runner to succeed Mr Putin, told a St Petersburg conference last month that energy exports, together with Russia's other extensive resource deposits, would be the foundation of its national revival. They would provide funds to renew its infrastructure, diversify its economy and develop technologies.
"We should focus on establishing large corporations and supporting their foreign trade activities," Mr Medvedev said. The Putin administration has replaced what it saw as the self-serving 1990s oligarchs with a constellation of national champions. Some are state-controlled, like energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft, others what might be termed state-loyal private companies such as Lukoil, TNK-BP and Surgutneftegaz in oil and gas and Rusal in aluminium.
Russia's stance, then, is a robust defence of its interests but not a threatening one. Yet as long as Moscow's current thinking prevails, relations with the west are likely to be prickly. The two sides have not learned to speak the same language, as recent disagreements over energy have shown. Flashpoints also loom.
"There is a possibility in the next two years of a gross breach of US-Russian relations if and when Nato is extended to Ukraine," says Sergei Karaganov, head of Russia's non-governmental Council on Foreign and Defence Policy. The west may also face a dilemma if Russia's next elections are judged to have fallen below international standards. Declaring a Russian leader illegitimate would be highly risky. Russian foreign policy analysts warn more broadly that constant western lecturing of Russia may be counterproductive.
A common thread in Russian officials' comments is a desire no longer to be talked down to and treated as the loser of the cold war - and to enjoy the same freedom to choose its own path it feels is afforded to counterparts such as China.
"We don't believe we were defeated in the cold war. We believe we defeated our own totalitarian system," Mr Surkov told foreign journalists last week. "Moscow democratised this giant space which is now revitalising itself, no one else. If more people in the west looked at things in a similar way, they might respect us a bit more."
Neil Buckley
