Yes -- we are Scythians! Yes -- we are Asiatics/ With slanting and rapacious eyes!
-- Poet Alexander Blok, January 1918
"Russia has made its final choice in favor of a civilized way of life, common sense and universal human heritage."
-- President Boris Yeltsin, June 1992
Is Russia now part of the West, or still something clearly, if inexplicably, different? Earlier this month, the answer to that question might have seemed self-evident. After all, there was Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected leader of Russia, addressing a joint session of Congress and seeming to wed his country rhetorically to the...
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