Here is an article i stumbled accross while reading a paper talking about the 9th may invitation by Putin for commemorating the Victory over Nazy Germany. The article talks about Baltic states and Russia. Very good quality.

http://www.policy.lv/index.php?id=102947&lang=en


What actually happened in Russia in the 90s was not democratisation, but the privatisation of state functions, a creation of some sort of oligarchy between the political and the economic elite having very close linkage with the state institutions
...

However, this is not what the Russian people are asking for – to have the right to participate in the decision making of the state institutions. They want a caring and responsible state - that is what Putin is creating. It may happen, I stress – it need not happen, but it may happen, that in one or two generations the Russian society will democratise the ready state, but what it now needs is building the state, building responsible state institutions, building a functioning state. That is what Putin’s rule has been about, and we may not be particularly happy about the process, but we have to accept now that this is the primary interest for Putin’s presidency. Therefore before we start to criticize the non-democratic aspects or nature of this Putin’s state, we should think of how the Russian society was governed in the 90s and how it is governed now; how irresponsible the state behaved in the 90s and how responsible the state is acting today. So yes, we might criticise some non-democratic aspects of his rule, but Putin is building a functioning state and he has been quite successful so far.
Now that's interesting! I like what this persons says.

VM... how would you call this kind of media? Some bullshitted lie?

We must not forget that Russia has shared many European traces of developments, but has not been part of others. One of those traces of development or evolution of the European civilization that Russia has missed so far at least to a very large extent is the value of individualism, the value of each individual being a self-responsible person.
This article is definitely going into my favorites

Cheers

Mordan[/i]