Russia's post-Soviet humiliation

Life is one big status game, even for countries

‘The Motherland, our country, the great state entrusted to us by history, by nature and by our glorious forebears is perishing, is being broken up, is being plunged into darkness and oblivion.’

So declared the leaders of the 1991 Moscow coup in a signed declaration, ahead of their last-gasp effort to prevent Gorbachev from dissolving the Soviet Union. Th…