[simon]

Originally Posted by la aurora

Sorry, haku. But I can't even take it as offense. It sounds like well.. paranoia?
You sound pretty much idealistic when talking about 90ies and collapse of USSR. Are you aware that those heros of the era that released poor East European countries later admitted it was a mistake? And they actually had a lot of reasons for that? Or do you probably realize how much pressure from the West were they getting when making those decisions and what a mistake it was to do exactly what they were pushed into without thinking about hundred of important things they had to think about? What they did wasn't exactly good for most of East European countries.

The end of the Soviet empire and the collapse of communism had very different effect in different places. In Russia, Yeltsin practiced a form of 'democracy' that meant lawlessness and a brand of kleptocratic 'capitalism' that turned out to be a handful of oligarchs somehow ending up as owners of Russia's natural resources, which they 'bought' from the state for almost nothing. This went hand in hand with a huge collapse in living standards and of the health of the people. Something rather similar, sometimes more extreme and sometimes less extreme, happened in most of the other European countries that had been part of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, most of the former satellite states and the Baltic states had a rather different experience. There was economic contraction and a lot of pain, but not on anything like the same scale. There was corruption, but the states did not become kleptocracies. Fairly functional democracies were extablished with normal party systems and alternation of power between parties. After several years, the economies started to recover. They joined NATO and EU.

Russia was headed down a slope to social implosion when Putin became president. But, luckily, the price of oil and gas, Russia's main exports, stopped falling and rose to be unusually high. Putin then took back Yukos and used that example to frighten the other oligarchs into paying taxes.

The other European countries in the USSR didn't have many natural resources. They remained headed in a very frightening direction. In Georgia and Ukraine there were popular revolutions inspired by the idea of getting off that track and onto the track the central Europeans had followed. But Putin's Russia doesn't want more countries to go down the Western route.

The West was wrong to back Yeltsin so enthusiastically. It was apparent early on that he was pursuing very flawed policies, but there was a mistaken assumption that things would work out in the end. Actually, they ended up discrediting the idea of democracy in Russia.

And it's funny how now we went back to imperial Russia that suddenly becomes an ethalon of evil. Will we go even deeper in history now? What's next?

It's not thinking Russians are evil, it's pointing out that Russia is behaving in the imperialist way it did in the past.

As far as I know, Yeltsin started Chechen War. Putin started none. Bullying attacks and territory claims... I wonder if we are really as bad as you make it sound, because if we occupied any of our neighbours lately, I'm not informed.

Yeltsin started a war in Chechnya, as you say. It ended in Chechen independence. When Putin was prime minister he started the second Chechen war and has continued it through his period in office. Putin rode the popularity of starting the second war to the presidency.

The pretext for starting the second war was the apartment bombings. It's interesting that soon after the last of those bombings Russian police caught FSB officers planting such a bomb in another apartment building. The FSB said it was just a training exercise, but it does seem rather suspicious. It's also curious that many people in Russia who have tried to investigate those bombings have been assassinated.

What I see now is not soviet rhetoric, I hear rhetoric of cold war. You are basicly creating an image of a big evil enemy of humanity now. No wonder you thought the same about USSR.

You were two when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. He was completely different from all previous Soviet leaders and over the next few years life in the USSR and international relations were transformed. When you were six the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War was definitively over. You can have no personal memories of what the Cold War was like. We are old enough to remember those times. The attempt to smear Estonia and its supporters as fascists is straight out of the playbook of Soviet propaganda in the Cold War against the West.

This new cold war is different from the old one. Russia's big new weapon isn't its armed forces, it's gas. Turning off the gas has already been used against Georgia and Ukraine to force them to pay Western rates as they were no longer Russian allies. Most countries formerly in the Soviet bloc are completely dependent on Russian gas and as North Sea gas runs out western European countries are beginning to rely on it too.The spectre stalking Europe right now is fear that Russia will turn off the gas supply to exert political control. It's already done it to Georgia and Ukraine. Who's next?