Last time I shot a television program about politics in Russia, only a couple of years ago, the camera crew and I happened upon a public demonstration across the street from the Moscow headquarters of United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s political party. There were about 20 men standing silently in a straight line along the sidewalk. They were holding signs protesting a decision in their town, not far from the capital, to build a United Russia office building on an empty plot of land where they had parked for years when they headed to their factory jobs next door.

To be sure, in the dark days of the Soviet Union, I saw KGB thugs assault and arrest dissenters for simply stepping across a chain to lay a flower at the foot of a statue. (They also pulled the camera off my cameraman’s shoulder and threw it on the ground. Thankfully, heavy snow cushioned the impact and the tape survived, airing across the U.S. that night on ABC.)

In contrast, the men I saw across from Putin’s party headquarters weren’t hauled away and arrested. Russia had come that far. But when the protest leader saw that one of his comrades had backed halfway off the sidewalk and had his heels on the grass, he shouted a stern warning to everyone to keep their feet strictly on the sidewalk. They were still burdened with memories when simply stepping on the grass could be called “destruction of public property” and used a pretext for imprisonment.

Now, tens of thousands are openly defying Mr. Putin. And no wonder. As one of his opponents put it to me in Moscow, Putin has “squeezed the life out of Russian democracy.” While roughly fifty political parties were born in the 1990’s when the Soviet Empire crumbled, Putin disqualified one after another and whittled them down to about half-a-dozen, all friendly to his government. While there were popular elections for governors and senators in the new Russia, Putin pulled off a u-turn and today they are appointed by the president. While free speech blossomed in those early days, news organizations that aired dissent were shut down. Basically, the liberties for which people had yearned for decades didn’t last for a single generation.

While it would be foolhardy to predict the outcome of these new nationwide protests— more are planned for Christmas Eve— here is a hint: Russia will not necessarily turn to American-style democracy. One reason is obvious. At a certain point Putin will have to decide: is he like Mubarak in Egypt, willing to throw himself on his sword to preserve the peace, or like Assad in Syria, willing to take off the gloves to preserve his power. That verdict isn’t in but never forget: Putin’s roots are in the KGB.

But a second reason is more revealing of Russian history and the Russian people. On my trip two years ago, I interviewed a member of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. He was in one of the last surviving opposition parties (although since we met, his party has been disqualified along with the others). One of my questions was, how has Putin gotten away with dispossessing people of the democracy they had craved for so long?

His answer was, “Russians in the ‘90s had major problems: the economy fell down, incomes fell down, corruption grew up, many things were terrible. And the name for that was ‘democracy’.” From their experience, their definition of democracy is different from ours.

The third reason we can’t predict Russia’s political future is the immediate past. Yes, Putin’s party showed up with the most votes. But whose horse came in second? The Communists.

For a variety of reasons, the United States needs to partner with Russia. But any future partnership may be no better than it’s been.

No doubt, plenty of experts will authoritatively tell us anyway. But here’s why they shouldn’t: no one knows. And if you don’t believe that, consider this: at the beginning of this year, you could have asked that question, “What’s next?”, to the leaders of the very nations where rebellions rose up— Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, Assad in Syria, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Saleh of Yemen— and they themselves didn’t have a clue….even though each one had eyes and ears on every street corner of his country.

So we can only guess about what’s next, and we can only base those guesses on our experience. Mine, covering many nations rent by revolution, is that a whole spectrum of opinions and ideologies bands together to fight a common foe; the Arab adage is, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But that bond sometimes doesn’t last beyond the last rifle shot. One thing we know about Libya is, some of the rebels who fought shoulder-to-shoulder were guys who, before the revolution, wouldn’t have sat at the same table together.

History also shows that when so many have waited so long for a place at the table, they’ll push everyone else out of the way to get a chair. Such conflicts can torment a nation.

What’s more, those who speak now for Libya liberally use the word “democracy.” However, that means different things to different factions. For some, it means American-style freedoms of everything from speech to religion to opportunity. But for others, democracy means too much freedom— the freedom to upset moral and cultural norms that have stood them well for millennia.

But I also can cite encouraging signs that date back to my times in Libya. I never went there without meeting someone who told me, “Oh, I have a brother living in the United States,” or “My son is going to college in your country.” There is not the kind of intellectual vacuum in Libya that I’ve seen in less sophisticated countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, a vacuum that can enable the radical forces of terror to gain a dominant hold on power. Quite simply, Libya has an educated and comfortable middle class— not by our standards, but a middle class of merchants and technicians— whose lives have gotten better these past few decades and they know it wasn’t thanks only to the force of Allah.

If I see a problem, now that the rebellious factions in Libya must actually govern, it is that Gaddafi gave them no foundation to start. That’s because for forty years, Libya was a one-man show with Gaddafi at the top of everything: government, military, business, oil. Under his leadership, there was no individual initiative. Not even individual sports; everything had to be a team endeavor, everything had to be in the collective.

That’s one reason he stayed in power so long: he didn’t permit the organization of any kind of civic group that might grow into organized opposition. Libyans didn’t have the equivalent of our chambers of commerce, or PTAs, or even Girl Scouts. Every decision about people’s lives emanated from the top. The new Libya is born without a skeleton to build on. That’s worrisome. On the other hand, the new Libya is born without a likeable legacy to emulate. That’s encouraging.