- That’s nice to hear! During the Soviet days, Swedes were highly suspicious and negative towards Soviet, although we didn’t feel like we had any problem with the common people of Russia or any other member state of the union. The traditional attitude among Swedes were that Russia as such is a marvelous and fascinating nation with a population that, sadly enough, had been brainwashed and subjugated by a dictatorship.
“..nukes are necessary to refrain the USA from a military attack on Russia”
- Why would the US of today wish to attack Russia? Or do you mean such an unlikely situation, in theory, could develop?
“Okay I’ll try to compare this with the Russian GDP figure.”
- According to this list, The (nominal) GDP of Sweden isn’t exactly minute compared to that of Russia. The accumulated GDP of the ‘Viking’ nations (Finland included) is considerably higher than that of Russia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28Nominal%29
To begin with, Swedes as well as other Scandinavians have invested a lot of pension money on the Russian stock market. Then we have investments from private corporations and so on - and this is just Scandinavia.
ON THE OTHER HAND, this money is finding the way back to Scandinavia. Just one single example of this; I recently worked at the main plant of Volvo here in Gothenburg/Göteborg where we build the most expensive Volvo’s like the XC90 SUV and the S80 luxury sedan. Few cars that left the assembly line costed less than € 50 000. A lot of them went to Russia.
The bottom line is this: we’re getting rich together and this is due to achievements from both our countries.
“Just because we’re different. Russia’s religion is Orthodox Christianity, European’s is Catholicism or Protestantism. An Orthodox’s goal is to save soul for Heavenly Kingdom, a Protestant’s goal is to earn more money (and he, who can’t, is obviously a sinner).”
- Mammon is not the god worshiped by Protestants. The idea of Lutheran work ethics is that you serve God by being a hard working, moral and good hearted person. Traditionally, it has often been considered sinful in the Lutheran world to be greedy, to live a life in luxury or to fall in love in itself.
I wonder if the differences between Russians and Swedes are greater than those between Swedes and people from Sicily, Romania or Cyprus. If you honestly feel Russia is so different from Western Europe it could not contribute to the process of creating a unified, prosperous Europe as a full EU member, I have no objections. But perhaps Russians will feel different in 20-30 years, who knows?
Two corrections:
1. My home city is called ‘Göteborg’ in Swedish (it came out a little funny)
2. I wrote “..to live a life in luxury or to fall in love in itself”.
It was intended to read “..to live a life in luxury or to fall in love with money in itself”.
Sorry.