Who the f… is Russia?

If you ask people under 20 or even 25 what USSR stands for, the likely answer that you will get is that it is the acronym of a space ship. Almost two decades have passed since the political giant has collapsed, but the western nations did not seem to be very interested where the newly formed entity is heading. Truth is, aside from sizing some economic opportunities and fetching some cheap resources (which are not cheap anymore) they were not at all concerned with what is happening inside the former communist countries. But Russia has evolved. They had glasnost and perestroika. They had street revolutions. They had “oligharchs” and they had rampant mafia. All these were gone, but they were not meaningless. Winston Churchill once said about history “The further backwards you look the further forward you see”. In may seem naive, but if you magnify the scale of the recent events, is like looking back into the history of Russia, back to about the tsarist period. And the name itself, Russia, fits well. Where is the tzar, then? What is his meaning and what does he want for his own country? What about its neighbors? I am sure Mr. Putin has some answers to these, as well as to the surge of nationalism inside the new Russia. And I must say, Russia was not a country to be ignored, back in the tsarist days.