This paper situates Putin’s Russia along several historical and comparative dimensions: post-totalitarian and post-imperial contexts, the failure of market democracy in the 1990s, and the logic of the petro-state. It argues that Putin’s "Potemkin democracy," which combines authoritarian government with the structures of democracy, a partly free economy, and a substantially free society, is best understood in terms of the dynamics of a political machine. A broad and multi-layered international perspective (e.g., Japan under the Liberal-Democratic Party, Italy under the Christian Democrats, the American South from 1878–“1965, US urban politics in the North in the early to mid-twentieth century, etc.) underscores how, by capturing the machinery of public administration, dominating key sectors of the economy, and shaping mass media coverage of politics, a faction can maintain the structures of democracy while minimizing genuine democratic accountability. Putin’s machine has had the paradoxical effect of helping Russia escape the crisis of the 1990s while minimizing the chances that Russia can escape the logic of the petro-state.