Word: sovietizing
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Since the Soviet collapse, no major platforms have emerged in Russia for its computer experts to innovate. As a result, many of them have emigrated, while many others have turned to hacking, a field in which Russians seem to excel. In January, police arrested a 40-year-old computer whiz for hacking into a Moscow advertising mainframe and turning a giant billboard display into a clip of hard-core pornography over one of the city's main streets. To avoid detection, the man had routed his attack through a proxy in Chechnya, a sophisticated trick. But for all his skills...
That ambition, at least, is admirable. But for all Medvedev's project evokes of free thinkers brainstorming in a park, it still has a distinctly Soviet feel. It relies on central planning rather than a movement of geeks in garages, and it will be managed by the state. What it reveals, experts say, is the irreconcilable conflict between the Kremlin's new-age ambitions and age-old desire to control...
...calming people's fear of the government. "As soon as people hear about this idea, they think of a state conspiracy to shove everyone into this domain, close the door and turn on the gas," Kolesnikov tells TIME. "This makes no sense. But it is part of the Soviet person's instinct. It is impossible to convince people it's not true...
Washington struggled to persuade the European members of NATO to pull their military weight even in the years when the alliance's purpose was to protect them from a Soviet invasion. Now that NATO is fighting a real war against assorted insurgents far from home in Afghanistan, getting the Europeans to pony up resources is proving to be an even tougher sell - and threatening NATO's very survival. (See pictures of the U.S. Army Reserve...
...repeat that: even without a superpower rival like the Soviet Union - with its arsenals of nuclear weapons, fleets of tanks and armadas of warships, all manned by 10-foot-tall Red Army troops - the U.S. is now spending more preparing for war against, well, who knows, than we spent readying to fight Moscow. And the Obama Administration has made it clear that defense spending is going to continue to increase, even as fiscal pressures - for bailouts, health care, infrastructure - inexorably mount...