From a young Russian journalist: "Why We Russians find Putin so great." Worth reading.

[sibelian]

17. No, Russia. These days, we do not "respect" you.

Mostly we pity you. You are clearly very unhappy.

You have chosen not to earn respect but to coerce the pretense of it by blocking anything that might subject your nation to the ordinary process of criticism. You perceive the absence of criticism as respect. It's not respect. It's just silence.

And then you remember that you had no patience with other nations doing the same thing. You know that you are cheating. But you don't want the cheating to be your fault, because that diminishes you in your own mind. And you think your mind is the same as everyone else's mind. You think your lack of respect for yourself, your cheating, and your self-loathing is everyone else's fault. So you go back to the drawing board because you know deep in your heart that you are dependent on other nations for your understanding of yourself and try once more to get them to respect you.

But you've spent so long having no respect for yourself and everyone else that you've forgotten what respect really is or what it feels like. So you just go back to the coercion.... over and over again...

The rest of us know that, today, you cannot accept yourself. You have forgotten.

We will wait. One day you will look back at your cathedrals, which are the most beautiful buildings humanity has ever constructed, and your powerful and universally worshipped literature, your extraordinary classical composers and your total dominance of that discipline, the first machine in space and the first man in space... and realise that respect is an emotion, not a resource. It is felt or it is not. It is freely offered or it is worthless.

You were never so foolish looking as when you were defensive. You were always at your greatest when you allowed yourself to think and to feel. No-one came close to you.