Clifford J. Levy wrote this in The New York Times over the weekend:

Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed.
...
In truth, the Russians express no desire to return to Communism as a far-reaching Marxist-Leninist ideology, whether the Soviet version or the much attenuated one in Beijing. What they admire, it seems, is the Chinese ability to use a one-party system to keep tight control over the country while still driving significant economic growth.
...
The fascination with the Chinese Communist Party underscores United Russia’s lack of a core philosophy. The party has functioned largely as an arm of Mr. Putin’s authority, even campaigning on the slogan “Putin’s Plan.” Lately, it has championed “Russian Conservatism,” without detailing what exactly that is.
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Even so, Mr. Putin’s political aides have long studied how to move the political system to the kind that took root for many decades in countries like Japan and Mexico, with a de facto one-party government under a democratic guise, political analysts said. The Russians tend to gloss over the fact that in many of those countries, long-serving ruling parties have fallen.

I'm sure that the ever-practical Putin is more concerned with matters of brass tacks like jump starting Russian industry, repairing infrastructure, cultivating a healthier, more industrious work-force than he is in forging a national narrative. But as a student of power, Putin also knows that he has to have a set of myths to feed his people to motivate them.

It's highly ironic to me that the China of Den Xiaoping has become a philosophical model. Deng after all is the man who dispensed with 90% of the ideology of Mao and said, "No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat."

But as he showed at Tiananmen Square in 1989, he wasn't shy about sending out the tanks.

China has certainly cleaned our clock in the Deng and post-Deng era. It still amazes me that China has gone from being an utter basket case in the year of my birth (1969) to being the only world power that is unarguably on the rise. Certainly they still have many problems. Many many problems. Dictatorships are inherently criminal after all. But considering that the Cultural Revolution was the definitive exercise in implementing Chaotic Evil as a governing philosophy (the Khmer Rouge after all were just small scale imitators of Mao's practices), its just amazing that China has been able to make as much material progress as they have.

Of course, their decision to emulate our car-centric consumptionist economic model will likely prove the undoing of not only China but the human biosphere on Earth...

Putin, poor devil, is playing a bad hand and I don't think there's any chance he can trigger another Russian century. The deck is stacked against the Russians and it may be that they'll never recover from the consequences of two world wars, a revolution and Stalinism -- the genetic consequences alone of purging millions of your best and brightest cannot be understated. And the Aral Sea speaks to the ways the Communist squandered natural resources and left ashes in their wake.

I expect at some point in the next century, the Russians will get to study the Chinese methods at very close range. From under the boot heel as the Chinese finally just grab away the Siberian petroleum that is so close and so needed in the Middle Kingdom.