Perhaps one of the most precarious moments in recent political history was when the ex Soviet Union ceded power to the Americans - namely Eastern Europe. Britain was and remains well placed to support an ex Imperial power eat humble pie from the international community, because it had to do the same a generation earlier. However, this shock to the status quo can indeed be a incredibly sensitive moment.
Russia had to adapt to a new self-image, its military agenda completely anachronistic, its belief in the inevitability of socialism destroyed and the 'science of Marxism' profoundly humiliated in a realization that it had not just failed to inspire successful rejection of Capitalism, but that the Capitalist West had won the Cold War without crowing about it - how insulting!
Belief system
Autobiographically only Russia could restore Russia back to its superpower status.But the international community watched with baited breath as the tug of war between those antagonists to the status quo and the opportunists and the enlightened despots fought for ascendency in Russia. Russia clung-on and pulled out of post-soviet political nose-dive.
Any Nose dive and you become a quick learner. This isn't just about this dangerous moment in history in the inevitability of capitalism in Russia, but about the global credit crunch too. Stability is the global necessity and the status quo an absolute imperative. But Russian immediate conversion to Corporate Capitalism must have looked pretty dodgy from the West's perspective, but there was and is a common enemy of Communists, ex communists and all forms of Capitalism - namely the reforming democratic minority who are original. Originality both undermines the capacity of the state to impose and dictate, and tends not to be unscrupulous and manipulative. It reveals that the extreme political ideological polar opposites in all their 'glory' satirizing the Cold war when the two superpowers were eyeballing each other at the frontiers of Alaska. Their engagement in a toe to toe battle actually shared the common ancestry of hostility to the threat to the status quo. So antipathetic were Communism of the East and the Capitalist West that it is no surprise that the defection rates to each others agencies were more common than you'd think because both Cold War adversaries 'shared' hawkish rather than more moderate values, as a way to defend the status quo. Hawks breed hawks not doves! Right? Originality is the first casualty in such times, and yet the only open attempt to improve the quality of life without state invasion of one's privacy etc is to embrace the quality of individual freedom that basks in the human capacity to change, reform and grow. If that endorses Capitalism and originality, then so be it.