Hope that makes my comments more consistent.

As for pipeline rerouting - was that done before or after Yeltsin got done flattening the city? I am pretty sure it was after - though it might have been after the second Chechen war, when Russia reconquered what it had lost, in the Wikipedia formulation.

As for Merkel - we must be living in a different world, as Merkel has nothing to do with Thatcher or Thatcher's politics, except in the English language press. Interestingly, Merkel just proposed that companies should be strongly 'encouraged' to share their profits with their workers - strangely, I haven't read much English language press coverage about how Germany's new model Thatcher seems like an old model socialist. Too scary, I guess, to have a 'conservative' Christian Democrat actually suggesting that obscene profits taken from the labor of workers is just that - obscene.

What I simply meant is that Merkel is very familiar with how people like Putin did their work - after all, I'm pretty sure she has read her Stasi file, and as a university graduate, she passed the necessary tests to prove her desirability and political reliability to the state. I know a couple who were very Lutheran, and there was never any chance of her getting a job in a state run nursery school, and since the number of Lutheran kindergartens was very, very strictly limited, she knew that holding her beliefs meant never working in her desired profession - well, until 1989, that is.

Pointing out misinformation or false beliefs is fine - but please, don't think that everyone fits into your own misconceptions. And yes, I do know a number of people with very, very intimate experience with the East German, Romanian, and Soviet governments. The ex-Romanians and ex-Soviets were 'fascists,' being ethnically German, and that was what they were called before they applied to emigrate. As for the East Germans, well, what can I say? And as for the East Europeans I know, none seem nostalgic for 1985, though they tend to be quite, quite critical of 2006. After all, they don't believe what so many Americans consider to be a fundamental truth, that the rich getting richer is a benefit for us all.

What happened in 1989 was a small improvement for normal people in Eastern Europe (in objective things like the stopping of environmental pollution), and a disaster for most people living in the former Soviet Union. It was not the dawning of a shiny new world, as trumpeted in most Western media. And Putin was someone who worked, in Germany, trying to prevent what happened in 1989.

Merkel knows what he is, and quite honestly, Putin probably knows what she is - another ungrateful German fascist. However, on the news last night, the Russians just launched Germany's first military satellite, allowing Germany the chance to no longer have to rely on American intelligence (really, what Bush has done to American interests is unfathomable). Business is business, and both Merkel and Putin have a clear view of what they want, regardless of what they think of each other's past.

But to Merkel's credit, unlike Thatcher with Pinochet, I don't think she will have many regrets when Putin is buried.