How does Russia see itself

How does Russia see itself

"Russia has always had two ways of seeing itself:

As lagging behind the West and needing to catch up;

Or as subjected to Western attempts to hold it back.

In the modernizing mode the West attracts.

In the paranoid mode it repels.

To the Putin regime, now in full-on repulsive mode, isolation and confrontation reinforce each other.

It is far from a stable dynamic"

Says Mr. Kirill Rogov, a political analyst in The Economist of Feb 25, 2022.

I ask:
How can we decouple the embedded psyche of tyrants from the power of oil wealth?

How can the modern western civilization, with its unimaginable brain power, achieve serious communicative relations with the older civilization?

Talk to you next Wednesday, July 6, 2022