While I have no illusions about the benign intentions of Russia circa 2005, the world of 1984 has vanished from the face of the earth.
The dissolution of the USSR is a fact, and the reconstitution of such a power by a group of malignant apparatchiks is rendered impossible by the free flow, globally and in real time, of information.
Economically, Russia is a small power. It's entire national GDP, according to George Will, is comparable to LosAngeles County.
While Russia's potential is great, it faces huge demographic issues not the least of which is declining population and pressures from islamic savages along its southern borders.
Russia is courting EU and China, to advance its own interests, as any ordinary nation would; but it will be a decidedly junior partner in either case. By itself, the spectre of the USSR materializing out of the grubby Russian mobocracy is akin to a Grimm's fairytale.
Exactly.
We are expected to believe that the Soviet Union, in a stroke of mad genius, decided that the best way to advance the cause of international Communism was to allow ALL of Eastern Europe to slip the leash, to permit autonomous nations to arise in place of previously Moscow-controlled provinces, and to allow their military to slip into a twilight zone of outdated weapons, unpaid soldiers, grounded aircraft and a navy that is now suitable only for coastal defense at best, and that suddenly there will be nuclear hammers and sickles falling from the sky in a great nuclear Pearl Harbor or some such disaster?
In case nobody was paying attention, America still has the most potent and survivable nuclear deterrent on the planet, in the form of ballistic missile submarines, literally thousands of cruise missiles which can be made nuclear capable if necessary, SAC is still flying and more than up to any mission that gets thrown at them, and on top of that we still have enough ground based ICBMs to incinerate any enemy that decides to lob one or more nukes at us. If we knew there were incoming missiles targeting those ICBMs, the decision would be made to "use 'em so we don't lose 'em".
This Golitsyn material makes good reading, but so too was "The Third World War - August 1985" by General Sir John Hackett. He wrote a fantastic book, but it was FICTION.
Just like this stuff.