and socialist structures, in a nuclear superpower in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood. Even if entirely pessimistic attitudes towards present Russia would be most inconsiderate, it is impossible, especially from the viewpoint of the Baltic states, to neglect the security threat that Russia constitutes: It is a highly unstable superpower with huge military arsenal, a superpower that does not hide its aspirations to renew a hegemonic status and that tends to see the use of force as the means of driving its interest.In the Annual Assembly of the Paneuropean Union in Strasbourg, December 1999, our honoured President, Arch-Duke Dr. Otto von Habsburg, an eminent European who has seen rise and fall of two totalitarian empires, spoke about the alarming similarities between the end of the interwar period and our times. History never repeats itself identically, but it would be inconsiderate to claim that no tendencies of historical dj vu should be feared. The short positive and optimistic interregnum in Russia, best characterised not by Gorbachev but by Gaidar, came to its end already by the end of 1993, combined with Yeltsin’s turning from a national liberationist into a revanchist imperialist. Even if the early Russian Federation did not entirely resemble the Weimar Republic, the rise of the new regime, characterised by the former Security Committee’s hegemony, highly resembles the gradual loss of democracy in Weimar Germany. Besides the traditionally strong anti-Semitism of Russia, and besides the newly fashionable anti-Islamism, Russia has rehabilitated almost all the features of the Nazi geopolitical and imperial thinking. What is, however, even more alarming, is that the European countries seem to repeat the tones of Europe in the times of Hitler’s rise, when the Western toleration of Nazi German policies, and purposeful blindness at anti-Semitism and the prevalent propaganda, directly contributed to the expansionis...
