What the Mongols did to those people of the city located on the endless open plains without escape routes to the sea or mountains, capitalism and free markets will not undo in any short time. Especially now, under pressure from Islam –and NATO.

History, somehow terribly & critically off-footed, gave us Clinton and Yeltsin and the wall-fall all more or less at the same time, with one Al Gore as the west’s privy minister (‘privy’ because in violation of USA law, he never reported meeting minutes to congress) to the new Russia’s Chernomyrdin Commission, charged with melding USSR into a western state.

Can’t help but wonder, was Putinism inevitable, or not?