>That Russia is no longer in that situation seems to be one of the
>only positive things Putin thinks about the collapse of the USSR,
>from what I can gather from his public statements. (And that Russia
>no longer wastes money, in his view, on funding revolutions and
>socialist governments abroad. There are a number of Soviet jokes in
>which Castro is depicted as sucking on Brezhnev's teat.)
When I interviewed Kagarlitsky around 1992, I asked him what he thought of the breakup of the USSR. He laughed, and said, as a Russian he was glad to be no longer subsidizing the other republics. He then retreated from his joke, but it sounded like there was a bit of truthtelling disguised by the humor.
Doug