Kihnu, as you know I’m not unsympathetic to Russia or Russians. I understand that everyone has been shaped by history, and that Russia’s history has been exceptionally difficult, sandwiched as it is between invaders from the West and even worse invaders from the East. This experience has conditioned Russians to the survival technique of yielding uncritically and more or less passively to their own strong man. Even if he is as tyrant he is at least “our tyrant”, and probably not as horrific as the foreign ones. From the Russian perspective this comparison is valid even in regard to Stalin and Hitler – under Stalin, Russia at least survived, whereas it is questionable whether it would have survived under Hitler. But Russia’s traditional survival strategy also has an obvious down-side. It makes people tend to be passive before abuses that are heaped upon them by their own government, has prevented a national ethic developing of people taking responsibility for their own lives, their own country and their own mistakes, and it typically tends to make a person feel helpless to change things for the better. Such attitudes are not generally typical of Western countries. As well, Russians tend to automatically assume that their orientation of passivity before home-grown abuse is, or should be, also shared by their neighbours. They don’t understand why their Baltic neighbours, for example, consider such a collective yielding to central abuse as something odious and horrible, and why they will not be reconciled for a moment to a Soviet captivity which Russians view as their Soviet salvation. Both Estonia’s Russia’s national character (and everyone else’s, too) have down-sides, and the peoples concerned should try to rise above these. By the way, Kihnu, Russian emotion and sentiment, as expressed in music, literature and the arts in general is something I enjoy very much. I’ll see if I can access “Admiral” – if I can, I’m sure I will enjoy it.