An unfavorable comparison

From a Thomas Friedman column in the International Herald Tribune that I picked up boarding the plane back to Moscow:

...if you have societies held together by a voluntary social contract among its constituent populations, and by institutions, you don't need one-man rule. You don't need to mobilize the whole society around resistance to outsiders. And you don't need the suppression of every group in the society, other than the tribe of the one-man ruler - with all the violence and extremism that such suppression brings.

Friedman was writing about the legacy of Arafat, but it seems to me that these thoughts are at least indirectly relevant to the direction Russia is going under Putin.