On a summer day seven years ago, two Tupolev Tu-95s approached Canadian airspace near Inuvik. The four-engine turboprop relics from the Cold War era were still highly functional. Their arrival, though unannounced, wasn’t entirely unexpected. Three weeks earlier, Russian president Vladimir Putin had declared his country’s resumption of long-range patrols by nuclear bombers. It seemed that 16 years after it imploded, the Evil Empire was rising from the grave.

It was less clear whether it was inevitably rising with a hostile agenda. When Canadian fighter planes scrambled, the Russians did a leisurely 180 over the Beaufort Sea, which is the aeronautic equivalent of a U-turn, and headed home.

Apart from some log-book entries and a handful of news reports, the incident passed unnoticed. No harm done; our CF-18 Hornets enjoyed the exercise. Only the clock was set back to 1991. Why?

Try geopolitical dynamics, combined with the Russian soul. Russians are too numerous, too patriotic, too talented, and too ambitious to be satisfied with being bit players on the world’s stage. They want to be a headline act, and Putin is a good impresario.

It always seemed to me that the late Boris Yeltsin understood his compatriots well. He selected Putin as his successor, knowing that the ex-KGB officer might provide two things Russians particularly need and want: Democracy and autocracy. They want the first for prosperity, the second for respect.

A contradiction? In the West, maybe, but Russia isn’t the West. Saying that the masses desire both democracy and autocracy is a wisecrack here, but in Russia it’s reality.

Why do Russians desire democracy? Because Russians have eyes and ears, not to mention mouths and stomachs. They like to eat well and play with toys and gadgets as much as we do. They know exactly what free markets have achieved in the world, while their country was devastated by a command economy.

Why do Russians desire autocracy? Because, like other national entities, they’re creatures of their own culture and history. They sense, probably accurately, that under the circumstances of their entry into the age of democratic capitalism, they must still rely on their antique levers and buttons to operate the new-fangled machine. Russians yearn for a westernizing Czar, a modern Peter the Great, who brings the people market economy from the Kremlin as Peter brought them western manners, customs and technology over two centuries ago.

Czar Vladimir always has seemed typecast for this role. In 2005, as part of Russia’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Nazi surrender, he invited CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace to the Kremlin. The Russian leader’s conversation with the veteran reporter was to a real interview what TV wrestling is to a street fight. Putin actually couldn’t resist winking at Wallace in the end. Yet for all that, the charade was revealing.

First, it showed that Russia’s strongman found it advisable to mimic a Western leader. Instead of keeping a stony distance, he put on a show of relaxed transparency — at least, relaxed, Russian-style. On a program that airs domestically as well as abroad, Putin’s choice of image indicated the West is ahead on points in the culture wars.

Second, while making a strong pitch for Russia as a democracy and himself as a democrat, Putin also made it unmistakable, by body language as much as by words, that in Russia democracy ends where opposition begins. Russia is to real democracy what Putin’s cozy chat with Wallace was to a real interview.

Yeltsin had an additional reason for anointing Putin. An old lush he may have been; a fool he wasn’t. He gave Putin the nod in 1999 because the bear was done hibernating and the cave was a mess. Without a successor committed to protecting him, abdicating Czar Boris would have been in a heap of trouble. From his own point of view, Yeltsin chose wisely.

From the world’s point of view, choosing Putin was far more equivocal — but of course “the world” doesn’t get to choose any country’s leader. Putin straddles a chasm in Russia’s quirky soul that yearns for pleasure and pain, submission and conquest.

Are Russians nostalgic for Generalissimo Stalin? I doubt it, but they’re nostalgic for something because the Tu-95s came out of retirement. Presidentissimo Putin had them fire cruise missiles during a 2008 military exercise, reportedly for the first time since 1984.

Russia wants respect. Is sending nuclear bombers to the brink of Canadian airspace the best way to achieve it? Putin thinks so — which isn’t the saddest part of the story. The saddest part is that he may be right.

Some say it’s all a yawn. Why should the quirks of the Russian psyche interest us? The Cold War is history; the Soviet Union has imploded. What does it matter?

It matters. Russia hasn’t imploded. It just took Crimea from Ukraine, perhaps justifiably but by threat of force all the same. The Tu-95s are out of the mothballs; they keep approaching the edge of Western airspace. The last one buzzed Scotland this April, and the year before it was Alaska. Whoever sits in Putin’s chair has his finger on the nuclear button. The next time we scramble the CF-18s, the Tu-95s may just keep heading toward Inuvik. What then? Perhaps one day we can fall asleep over Russia. Not yet.