West - Russia: the selection of optics

The world is less and less dependent on the ambitions of individual states, the scale of problems requires joint and joint actions. Our Western neighbors quite successfully strengthen the institutions of such interaction, improve the language of concepts in which the dialogue is possible and effective. As for the inhabitants of the Russian political Olympus, such a language and such a way of thinking are still alien. The summit in Moscow left an unpleasant aftertaste - he really reminded the meetings of the Brezhnev “discharge” era during the “confrontation of the two systems”. It would seem that the “Iron Curtain” and Russia and the West began to look for ways to overcome “difficulties of translation”. And in some memorial they found, agreeing to the fact that there are universal values ​​that were included in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. But in recent years, the Russian constitution itself has turned into a monument to the lost illusions and the liberal hopes that had sunk into oblivion, what can we say about values? The German Bundestag just condemned Russian practice of political pressure on the court. And the OSCE parliamentary Assembly tried to “reunite divided Europe” on the basis of common memory of victims of totalitarian regimes. Official Russia met these attempts to bayonets. The sovereign Soviet past for the current government is an excuse for its autocracy in the present. Activity, more and more removing our country from a civilized world, where a citizen-collector can present the authorities with an account by which he has to pay.

The heads of state are also people. And therefore, they look at young girls, such as this assistant, who removes the pieces of paper with numbers indicating leaders, where their place during the shooting of a collective portrait. From left to right: Tarot ASO, Japanese Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, Barack Obama, US President, Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France and Silvio Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister, at Aquille summit. July 8, 2009

Photo Reuters