What it needs is to institutionalize that freedom by building a modern state to replace the antiquated tsarist system. It also needs a modern civil society to consolidate its multi ethnic post imperial population.

Three years ago, during the Tsarist capital s 300th anniversary, Putin hosted some 40 heads of state, ranging from George W. Bush and Gerhard Schroeder to Belarusian dictator Alexandar Lukashenka and Turkmenistan s Saparmyrat Nyazov, who styles himself Turkmenbashi, the father of Turkmen.

Indeed, Putin s signature characteristic is to be all men for all Russia s people. By blending the Soviet past with the Tsarist past and a few shards of Yeltsin era democracy, Putin seems to think that he can neutralize the extremes of Russian history.

Alexander Pushkin, Nicolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were all suspicious of the Poles, calling them cold, distant, and manipulative, and seeing Poland as always on the side of the West, rather than standing with its Slavic brothers. Indeed, Pushkin s friendship with Adam Mickiewicz ended in acrimony over the 1830 Polish insurrection against Tsarist rule.

Annexed by Tsarist Russia in 1812, joined to Romania in 1918, and re annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, it seized its independence from Moscow in 1991. It is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and various other prestigious international bodies.

In reality, since the end of the nineteenth century, using the covert and open protection of tsarist Russia and other States, the Armenian nationalists cherished an illusion of creating greater Armenia and perpetrated acts of genocide and terror at different times in eastern Anatolia and the South Caucasus, with the intention of cleansing the territories they wanted to occupy, brutally killing about 2 million innocent people.