That is the fear of Russians savvy enough to follow their Defense Ministry plans to form units that will jam enemy radios and disrupt civilian communications lines. Color revolutions petrify Russian authorities. As they blame NGOs for their success, they plan to limit their capabilities.

Do Russians care? Not as much as they should argues Robin Shepherd. Polls show most Russians agree with Putin that the Collapse of the USSR was a catastrophe. I do not necessarily blame them. Three (inibriated?) men should not be able single handedly to cause millions of people to wake up one morning in a country different from the one they went to sleep in.

Still, Shepherd is right to point out that to secure democracy in Russia" someone, somehow" must"reinvigorate a serious and wide-ranging debate about the Soviet past: the horrors of Lenin and Stalin; the psychiatric prisons for dissidents later on; the vast corruption; and the bloodstained tyranny of Soviet imperialism."

In other words, historians must step up to the plate, if Russia is to avoid another Ivan the Terrible.