From The International Herald Tribune:My wife and I will soon stop visiting our Moscow friends. It's too frightening. We can't even eat. They all talk about the financial crisis. A real epidemic of verbal panic has broken out.
Who spent us into this crisis? That's the secret question among Russia's rulers. They don't believe in chance, or predictability, or conscience. They do believe in plots. Against Russia. The Orange Revolution was a plot, and the Rose Revolution. And behind them stands America.
And for our Holy Russia, the financial crisis is a mortal threat, similar to AIDS. Why? Because it is developing against the backdrop of another crisis - a crisis of confidence in the state.
The state in recent years has become, as in Soviet times, impenetrable. The actions of the powers on high are unpredictable; they change or violate the rules of the game, and the only logic that can be surmised is that they do things to strengthen the state - or at least they think they do.
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