God, I love my country! They try oh-so-hard to break the good-old Cold War stereotypes, blaming the West for sticking with the old cliches. And yet at every step of the way they slip right back into the same rhetoric and behavior. On the Official President's Website there is a link http://www.openkremlin.ru/ that theoretically should take you on a ( Read more... )

Yes, I know it's not the most appropriate hour for a LJ post, but I was reading this article on MSNBC, and it got me thinking...

Russia has always been trying to catch up, outrun, outdo, outcompete. This has always been the goal, ever since Peter the Great. Back then it was attempted by fixing the facade, and quite literally so, as a matter of fact ( Read more... )