Over the last few months, a conversation I had 30 years ago keeps popping into my consciousness. It was the end of the Cold War, and a post-Soviet Russian state was on the horizon. I remember talking with a journalist friend about the astonishing potential of that turn of events: the return of Russia as a great power, returning to its ancient nationhood and old religion, moving away from communism, and resuming a major role in world and European affairs. Probably not a democracy, but no longer totalitarian, and worth engaging with as an authoritarian power.
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