Putin's Russia--Stalin lite.(Vladimir Putin)

World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." What this former KGB officer is saying is that it would have been better for the world if a totalitarian dictatorship, one that in the seven decades of its existence was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Russians and other peoples or their imprisonment in a Gulag slave labor system, were still to exist. Just imagine if German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder were to announce that the fall of the Third Reich was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

The more I see and read about Mr. Putin, in power since 1999, and his "managed democracy," the more apprehensive I become about the future of Russia and the safety of its neighbors. If Putin believes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent states represents the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," then it follows that Putin might well believe he should do something to repair the loss occasioned by his predecessors Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev. Millions of onetime Soviet citizens, including the beleaguered Chechen people, believe that they are better off today because of the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." But to Putin the end of the Soviet Union did not mean freedom ...