A Russian explains why Russian Elites are so Anti-American (written before Trump's election)

Brookings ^ | February 23, 2016 | Maria Snegovaya

[CondoleezzaProtege]

In the view of many contemporary Russian leaders, the United States occupies a space on the world stage that rightly belongs to Russia—based on its possession of nuclear weapons, its history and culture, having the largest national territory, and other factors. Yet Russia’s apparent inability to compete with the United States on the world stage has resulted, for some leaders in Moscow, in mixed feelings of resentment, envy, and admiration.

Speaking earlier this month at the Munich Security Conference, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that his country and the West are headed towards a “new Cold War.” He criticized Western leaders’ characterization of Russia as their biggest threat and wondered aloud whether the year was 2016 or 1962.

Yet the West is hardly to blame for renewed tensions. The real problem is that Russia is ruled by the leaders whose understanding of the world actually does stem directly from 1962.

Leonid Reshetnikov, a head of Russia’s Kremlin-linked Russian Institute of Strategic Studies (RISS), in a recent interview made several bold historical claims, including that “the United States first attempted to destroy Russia in 1917 by assisting the Bolsheviks, that Washington tried it again by hounding Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in late 1930s, and yet again by destroying the Soviet Union in 1991.

It’s worth pointing out that Reshetnikov, Patrushev, and Putin are all former Soviet secret service officers. All three served in Russia’s security services during the peak of Soviet anti-Americanism, which followed the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The security services....

[hecht]

and the Müller’s got their arses kicked in.

[joshua c]

Canada has a huge amount of territory too but like Russia most of it is uninhabitable.