Quote:
Originally Posted by haku
That article hits the nail right on the head. Indeed, Yeltsin wanted Russia to break away from the USSR, he wanted it to collapse and disappear just like all other Eastern European countries, and that's why Russia's relations with its neighbors and the West were so good at the time, in the mid 90s there were even talks of Russia eventually joining NATO and the EU… Those days are long gone.
With Putin we are now once again dealing with an imperial Russia with territorial claims on its neighbors and bullying tactics, and that makes all the difference. The Russian official rhetoric is now strikingly similar to what was coming from the USSR when i was a teenager, it's pretty much the same political line with simply 10 to 15 years of detente between then and now (and since we are on a Tatu forum, Tatu's short success in the West will probably remain a symbol of that detente period).
Those who had warned already in the early 90s that we would have a short window to spread and consolidate democracy to Eastern Europe before Russia would revert to an authoritarian regime turned out to be absolutely right.
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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.
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?
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.
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.