You are absolutely correct in your comment about the post-war era. I notice you live in Poland, and I hope I did no offend you, that was not my intention. Neither was it my intention to laud Russia as a paragon of victimhood leading to sainthood.

After the second world war, the US and the Soviet Union divided the spoils of a broken Europe like vultures over a corpse. For the US, it was the Marshall Plan which so generously “helped” a destroyed western Europe rebuild itself (and conveniently stop the spread of communism), for the Soviet Union, it was the Easter block. Capitalism vs. communism/socialism. NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact. The methods of the overlords looked very different. In the West, the mirage of capitalism and consumerism***. In the East, the stick, the occupying army. It is fair to say that the Eastern Bloc countries suffered a lot more, and I can understand that there is much residual bitterness towards what is now Russia. All in all, European countries were little more than pawns in the US and USSR game.

At the end of your comment you state that there is darkness and light in every place. I totally agree with you. Indeed, if we were to open the closet of every single country in this world, we would see a heap of skeletons in each one of them. I also believe that no amount of beauty or glory makes up for the skeletons, but neither can their beauty and glory be discounted because of the skeletons. However, at some point we have to say “Enough skeletons! Stop!”

These are interesting times. We are in an era when we can talk to each other at the grassroots level across large distances just by using our computers and grow in understanding and solidarity. With such ease of communication we can also denounce the abuses and the dirty schemes of our own governments, regardless of where we live.

***(It slowly morphed into the European Union, which in effect is now a soft politburo with large corporations and banks pulling the strings and imposing the will of the unelected few on member states that are expected to give up their sovereignty and slowly lose their identity as they meld into an amorphous European mass. In passing I am concerned when I see former countries of the Eastern bloc now subjected to the diktats of Brussels, and encouraged when I see some pushback against Brussels. As an aside, I am crossing my fingers that NATO will disband. But that’s a different topic.)