you are the media you consume.
Here's my ill-informed and biased cliff's note of the situation:
Obviously "things" have "changed" enormously. My litmus test is standard of living and political freedom and I discount changes in ideology, hence (I think) our differences on what "change" means.
The standard of living has improved overall, though in fairness, some of the more rural areas are fairing worse since Communism. But even that is slowly changing. I'm not sure we have a lot of information about the standard of living under Communism. Or how you quantify that. People are buying homes and cars for the first time. There is a "middle class" for the first time...
Political freedom? Just because it is worse than under Yeltsin (though freedom of speech is not high on your list when you are starving) does not mean it is as bad as it was under Communism. Russia has one of the most active Internet communities on the planet. Most of the nationalization of the media has been limited to TV. At this point, there is no possible way they could return to a Soviet-style repression. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
Magnifico said:
I think the New Cold War would need to survive at least one leadership change on both side of the U.S.-Russia equation... Russia has already "changed". So, if relationships do not improve with a new U.S. president in 2009, then it's no longer the New Cold War... it's just Cold War II: The Climate Change.
To which I asked, mostly as an agreement with his post:
Has either country changed significantly at the institutional level since 1990?
The answer, in terms of foreign relations, seems to be no. The US has always been belligerent towards the Soviet Union / Russia, and having "won" the cold war, decided that the rest of the world really does have to do its bidding, and pressed its influence into Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Soviets were nominally belligerent while in power, but the threat they posed was overstated by the western media outside the nuclear threat, and despite a non-belligerent Russian government today, the nuclear threat still remains, if for no other reason that the continued existence of the missiles.
Somehow this turned into me being insensitive toward the suffering of the people living in the former Soviet Union. Herding cats indeed - we can knick each other with a 1000 cuts, or maybe engage with people who, you know, actually hate Russia, of which there is no shortage.
The fact is that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was already a sort of regime change, and then you have a couple of constitutional crises: the reactionnary 1991 coup which destroyed the USSR and then the 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis which changed the constitution of Russia, ended up with prominent politicians in jail and altered the political landscape. Then you had the domestic political ramifications of the Chechen wars, and the transition from Yeltsin to Putin which in my view had the biggest effect in reining in the oligarchy created in the 1990's.
So even if now Russia's international stance looks as confrontational as in the 1980's (though I don't believe for a minute Russia would embark in an imperialist adventure like Afghanistan - and Abkhazia and South Ossetia don't count given that we're talking about ethnic Russians many of which are Russian citizens) it can hardly be said to "not have changed".
On the other hand, the Bush administration is full of cold warriors who cut their teeth in the 1970's fabricating intelligence assesments about the Soviet threat, and even Obama has Zbigniew Brzezinski (who claims to have meddled in Afghanistan to draw the USSR into a war they couldn't win) as foreign policy advisor, so that side hasn't changed. I think Russia finds itself confronting the US despite themselves because of how confrontational the US continues to be. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
