Melik Kaylan, the fellow who in 2007 wrote a pretty popular travel piece about spending time in the Mikheil Saakashvili entourage, has a Georgia war anniversary opinion published on Forbes:

The West has furnished way too many levers and excuses to Moscow
propagandists in recent years, from the instability in Iraq to the
recent collapse in the global economy. Russia’s proffered alternative
grows closer and closer to the Soviet one daily: command economies,
Russian-backed political elites, subsidized industries, protected jobs,
state-owned media–the whole gamut. Plenty of folks, especially those
in power, in numerous countries from Venezuela to Uzbekistan now
consider this a viable alternative. If an iron curtain should descend
across the globe anew, we have to decide who to save and how much to
sacrifice. Solzhyenitsyn once said that the Russians were more likely
to triumph in the long run because they were more accustomed to
suffering and sacrifice. The Soviet collapse proved him wrong, for a
while. His words may yet come back to haunt us.

Kind of reminds me of that clip from the Simpsons when the Soviet Union was “just faking” that it had collapsed…

Last 5 posts by Robert Amsterdam

• Grigory Pasko: Journalists Are Fleeing Russia - November 20th, 2009
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• The Obstacle of Pride - November 20th, 2009
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