[efrahin]

The Russian Bear does not forgive Georgia for their freedom. The diplomatic channels will not work until they get what they want. The Economist Magazine have been warning about this situation for more than two years. Poor people of South Ossetia.

[Sidney Lanier]

The situation against Georgia was going on at the time we visited Moscow which will be two years ago this coming October. The problem is that the people of South Ossetia consider themselves aligned with Russia and want out of Georgia, and of course a small and relatively defenseless country like Georgia is not inclined to give up any of its territory. Situations like that are never good (e.g., India and Pakistan with Kashmir in the middle); I don't think that it's a particularly Russian experience when we look at history around the world....

[Sidney Lanier]

We just received an email from a relative in Russia who, simply put, pointed out that with the inevitable fall of communism (an economic system based on 'we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us' cannot succeed...), the right-wing oligarchs currently in power (those responsible for Russia's part in the Georgia situation) have replaced the left-wing communists as rulers, and that in many ways nothing has changed insofar as the bureaucracy and politics are concerned.

This same woman told us a story when we visited there nearly two years ago of her 8-year-old son coming home from school around 1980 with a poem that he was required to memorize to recite to a group of visiting governmental dignitaries extolling the virtues of communism (again an economic system destined to fail). She read it first and said there was no way she was going to have the boy comply. Instead she had him memorize something very eloquent but very different and infinitely more truthful. She just felt that integrity was more important than politics, and she stood her ground. We were puzzled by this, based on the assumption that the pap we'd always been fed was that she would immediately been arrested and sentenced to the firing squad or at least sent to Siberia, and we told her this. It was then her turn to be puzzled from the point of view of where we had gotten such an exaggerated impression. After all, the citizenry there are people just like us here. Interesting....

Over the centuries, sadly, Russia has not had a healthy history, whether economic or political (or combination), to be a basis for society there. Of course, this is true for many countries, but one as large and powerful as Russia makes for bigger news than, say, the military bunch running Burma (Myanmar)....