>When Americans talk about Russia (or the USSR), they just sound wierd.
I talked to a German journalist a few years ago - who unlike most American journalists was a serious, thoughtful guy who knew a lot about the USSR - who told me about a visit to the Berkeley politics department in the late 1980s. A bunch of tenured profs could only ask him, repeatedly, whether Gorbachev was "serious" about his reforms, or whether it was all a ruse or prank. And this was well into Gorby's reign, not in his early days. He was stunned.
Doug