The muddle-headed bear

"Russia is a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma." This too often repeated definition by Winston Churchill is still surprisingly actual.

No democracy survives without a market economy but market economies seem to flourish in dictatorships, too.

Today’s Russia is a self-declared capitalist country and that is why we in the West now love Russia and tolerate a lot from them, even more than from each other. The EU seems to flirt with the newly converted. It easily tolerates Gazprom’s protectionism but not that of Microsoft.

During the Cold War the West was somewhat more cautious when dealing with the Soviet Union. Can you, dear reader, imagine that Helmut Schmidt in his days could have accepted the chair-manship of a Soviet-owned energy firm?

Of course it is false to expect all countries to become democracies. As well we could tell the dogs they should not lick their nether regions. Boris Yeltsin only pretended to promote western values.

We up North are asking ourselves if a reforming Soviet Union might after all have been for the best of us all instead of this gangland called the Russian Federation.

The Soviet Union was no doubt also a country run by a mob but Mikhail Gorbachev at least tried to dismantle some of the tyranny. But what do we have today? Do we even know? And who really runs the country? The "good czar" Vladimir Putin or his evil boyars?

Ivan the Terrible hated the boyars. In order to fight them he created his own police force, the Oprichiniki. They massa-cred nobles and peasants to order.

Is FSB, the secret police, in the hands of the boyars or is Putin terrible enough to steer them the way Ivan did?

"Russia is a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma." This too often repeated definition by Winston Churchill is still surprisingly actual.