WAR GAMES IN RUSSIA

. . .Remember when Pravda was just a cool, comically distorted, subversive thing to read, something you couldn't find at your local bookstore and had to go to Northampton to get your hands on? Well, stories like these make me long for those days, when we had the certainties of the cold war and the insane but stable logic of mutually assured destruction. Politics, like life, is lived forward, of course, and it's futile to spend too much time reminiscing on the stability of the bipolar world of yesteryear. Still, this story plus the Russian split with Bush on Iraq, plus the struggles between Russia and the U.S. for dominance in central Asia, plus lots of other stuff, lead to some long-term worries that I don't have the categorical or theoretical acuteness to define precisely.