While Mother Nature (super-storm hurricane Sandy) was causing destruction throughout the north-eastern seaboard of the United States on Monday, across on the other side of the world Russians were remembering a man-made destruction. Over a period of two years (1937-38), approximately 1.7 million people were arrested and sent to gulags, and of which more than 750,000 were executed under Joseph Stalin's brutal crackdown. Why is this Remembrance Day particularly poignant for the Russians this year? In all likelihood Russian efforts to regain superpower status is going to be associated with increased state repression. (This is the third of a series of articles on potential superpowers.)
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a prelude to the fall of Russia as a super power. Although the Russians gained all sorts of freedoms in their strangely evolving democracy, they concurrently lost their real living standards over the entire decade of the 1990s. This marked an economically difficult and humiliating time for the former super power. To Read More…….
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