Column: Russia's problems go far beyond Putin
give them a special insight into Russian history. Even during periods of democratization, the Russian authority view of the Ukrainian question was not amicable. The Ukrainian language was officially banned twice during the liberal reforms of Alexander II. Gorbachev claimed that Ukrainians themselves did not want their children to learn Ukrainian.
That might be so. It’s just that it doesn’t make much of a difference for Ukrainians, not then and especially not today. Many of Russia’s brightest minds seem to suffer from aExamples abound.
It seems that buried deep behind Russian megalomania is an inferiority complex. Russians cannot fathom how, after emerging victorious over Napoleon and Hitler, they are now living worse than the French and the Germans. Similar to Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes, the constant failure to “catch up and overtake the West” pushes many to conclude that “the West” is not for them. Russia is no country, but a separate Civilization, to which “Western rules” do not therefore apply.
It is just that, as the case of the Marshall Plan tells us, even postwar Europe, with its longstanding democratic traditions, had a hard time dealing with its problems. No country can “do their homework” without external assistance.
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