wolf, i think he s very worrie. he is an adept student of russian history and knows fully well the most difficult thing to do is lose a russian war, and 1989, two years later, you have the end of the soviet union, these things are linked, you think of the 1905 russian/japanese war, which the russians lost to the japanese and then in 1917, they were losing in world war one, and this leads to mutinies, a familiar term here, which lead to the collapse of the romanoff empire. so i think putin in his speech addressing these issues mentioned the 1917 revolution, not for the first time he re-wrote a history in the back saying there was a stab in the back and that s why the russians lost. no, the russians lost because of their incompetence. and there were military mutinies which led to the rise of the