>Just a small comment on this bit by Hakki:
>
>Any non-Russian citizen of former Comecon countries or former Soviet
>republics will agree that the USSR was imperialist, and will probably spit
>or swear when doing so :)
>
>This is true as far as the Baltics go, but a lot of people in the
>non-Russian CIS rue the day the USSR fell.
Wasn't the flow of resources in the old USSR just the opposite what you'd expect from an imperialist power? Didn't Russia subsidize the Central Asian republics? And as for what we used to call the captive nations of Eastern Europe - most had incomes higher than the Russian average, right? Also not capitalist-style imperialism.
Doug