So who are these people with red flags?
On the Red Square, people demonstrate their support for Putin's Ukraine policy. The flags say "USSR 2.0" and "The Meaning of the Time"
The past 23 years brought plenty of good change to Russia; all that time one could think that with a setback here and there, overall, Russia had been moving in the right direction: greater freedoms religious, political, and economic; recognition of the historical wrongs committed in the name of Communism; recognition that markets, not socialism bring prosperity; recognition of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet the election of a KGB apparatchik to presidency was the first sign that the one change that did happen in all other countries formerly in the Soviet sphere of dominance did not happen in RF: the country remained attached, at times passionately, to its Soviet past. While everywhere else from Bulgaria to Estonia people spent these 23 years building free European nations, Russia was forever re-celebrating the conquests of 1945.
Now no place for doubt remains: there is no new Russia; there is precisely what their flags say, USSR 2, smaller and perhaps angrier. The young generation got the taste for European vacations, learned languages and manners, but they are still the product of their unrepented historical past.
envy Russia’s oil and gas supplies
But that isn't the point, is it? Of course it is better to have something than not, but the economy 90% oriented to export of raw material is structurally a third world economy.
In Moscow: For Russia and Ukraine without Putin