Much needed article, Eric! I'm glad you brought up this topic.
I try to follow your posts here as much as possible and am very impressed with your creative fertility lately. I also admire the breadth of your interests and the desire to get to the bottom of the truth in every issue.
Your articles are distinguished by a balanced and objectivity, which is rare in our time of madness and ignorance.
Returning to this article, I can say that I was surprised by your statements about "cynical and paranoid Russia." Briefly, the abstract of the article is as follows:
1) The modern West (led by the USA) is trying to establish its power around the world, constantly interfering in the internal affairs of other states, changing legitimate governments and invading independent countries.
2) Russia has been repeatedly subjected to military invasions by Western countries (some of them were aimed at seizing its territories and even destroying it as a state).
3) The collapse of the eastern military bloc and the collapse of “big Russia” (USSR) itself, a radical weakening of its military power and the abandonment of its national interests (it was even said openly) led to the expansion of NATO towards Russia, the establishment of anti-Russian regimes loyal to the United States in former Soviet "fraternal republics".
To the latter, one can add that the United States has deployed [potentially] offensive missile systems near the borders of Russia and officially proclaimed it its enemy (at the same time, “rude” and “aggressive” Putin continues to politely call the US and NATO countries “our partners”).
4) Russia should not be afraid of Western military intervention in relation to itself.
It would be very interesting to know what your statement No. 4 follows from. It is present in this article as an axiom, but clearly does not fit well with statements Nos. 1, 2, 3.
Caricature:
By the way, as regards the Russians' distrust of their government in terms of vaccination, in my opinion, this is not an argument in favor of the West. On the contrary, Russians do not trust their government when it copies Western measures by not answering obvious questions about COVID-19 to its people. At the same time, many Russians admired the governments of Sweden and Belarus, which for a long time did not recognize the pandemic. These Russians do not consider such a position unambiguously correct, but they are attracted by the very fact of the manifestation of a dissenting opinion in a sea of covid hysteria.
I also allow myself to correct a “small inaccuracy” about the civil war. The Mensheviks are a smaller part of the RSDLP, which split in 1903. In 1918 it was a rather small party (like the Bolshevik party). During the civil war, the Bolsheviks (Reds) fought not against the Mensheviks, but against the White Guard, which united people of various beliefs: from the "socialist revolutionaries" to the monarchists. Most of the "whites" were bourgeois democrats ("the Cadets" and "Octobrists").
