Word: sovietizers
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...Magic Powder It is not only in the former Soviet Union and its satellites that the twin forces of globalization and communism's end have created criminal networks. In Africa, for example, proxy conflicts of the cold-war continent mutated into much more deadly struggles between criminally financed militias over minerals. Nowhere was this more clear than in the awful war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that broke out in 1998. In large measure, the war was driven by complex criminal conspiracies. A map of the main zones of conflict between the various armies and militias coincides with...
...Kremlin's major (and not so major) crimes against Russians and non-Russians alike. There's the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the dismemberment of his Yukos oil empire. There's the 2007 alleged cyberwar Russia launched against Estonia in the wake of a flap surrounding a Soviet war memorial...
...these sundry violations - of any democratic sensibility or common sense - are not simply side effects of a resurgent Russian authoritarianism. They're indicators, Lucas argues, of a more threatening development: the re-emergence of the battle for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Baltics - the whole former Soviet space. While Europe sleeps, he suggests, Moscow's secret police are infiltrating foreign governments, establishing a transcontinental energy monopoly and exploiting divisions between Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Tallinn. Exacerbating all of the above is the fact that no one is doing much to counter this angry, revanchist Russia...
...really a book about a new geopolitics. Alas, The New Cold War doesn't read like a book about anything so monumental or metaphysical as a cold war. Instead, it comes across as a series of news stories on an unfortunate turn of events in the former Soviet Union...
...Russia doesn't know what it wants to be. This is an ideological, even ontological lassitude. The reason the postcommunist world is so unstable is not that Russia is on the verge of repatriating old turf. It's that Russia is navigating between two ideas of Russia: its former Soviet self and its current shadow of that former self - a cartoonish, hopelessly upside-down mythology versus a dispiriting reality. Russia will not transcend this dichotomy until it begins building a truly original future instead of trying to cobble together a distant past...