The main mistake of the West was that they couldn't really help the new Russian democracy to be established in Russia. The Western democracies had just to show on their own example how democracy works what is law state here we have laws and if you break the law you go to prison doesn't matter are you Russians Swiss citizenship of America doesn't matter this is the law don't break the law in 90s. Thanks to this absence of real democracy in the West Russians started to build up the criminal new criminal dictatorship in Russia without this helping from from the West it would not be possible.
Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most celebrated living Russian novelists and the only author to have won all three major Russian literary prizes. All his books have been adapted for the stage in Russia and they have been translated into 30 languages. In conversation with historian Victor Sebastyen Shishkin traces the roots of Russia’s problems, from Kievan Rus via the Grand Duchy of Moscow, empire, revolution and the Cold War to the now thirty-year-old Russian Federation. He explores the uneasy relationship between the Russian state and its citizens, and set out his view that there are really two Russian peoples: the disillusioned and disaffected, who suffer from what he calls a slave mentality, and those who embrace so-called European values and try to stand up to oppression. And he addresses the most vital question of all: Will Russia continue its vicious circle of upheaval and autocracy, or will its people find a way out of history?
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