Beren wrote:The difference is that Americans, even including such high-profile ones as Fareed Zakaria, are basically unaware of the issue.
@noemon I think that this will be interesting for you also.
I know people hate Thatcher but there is a story that Nemtsov liked to say after he had a chat with her. The story from his mouth went like:
1) Thatcher went to visit Russia after the collapse of the SU and Nemtsov was young at the time and was the major of Novgorod at the time if I am not mistaken. This was before his stint as the deputy prime minister.
2) So Thatcher came over to Novgorod and was walking around with Nemtsov and was asking a lot of random questions like how you deal with corruption, how you deal with the roads, how you deal with the civil service and so on.
3) She was quite old at the time so Nemtsov asked her, her baronesse Thatcher why do you even care about such things right now. We both know that majority of the people in UK dislike or hate you but you already have your legacy of transforming the UK and its economy from a sick man of Europe in to the world largest financial centre. So you are good historically even though the people might have a bad opinion of you.
4) And her answer was that she was curious about it because UK and Russia were similar in one main regard: They were both superpowers in decline and how is Russia handling its non-superpower status. She thought that UK managed to defeat its sickness in this regard and move forward while she thought that Russia would still struggle with this for the next 100 years which would be the cause of great tragedy both socially and economically.
Well, she wasn't wrong about Russia but she was wrong about the UK. This is the gist of the problem isn't it. As much as Thatcher and others tried to heal the wound, they weren't able to or people like Boris opened the wound again to get in to power. They got what they wanted in the end but at what cost?