“Periodically, though, (rather, once in a blue moon), Spiegel will surprise and produce an even-handed article...”
Yeah, occasionally. But only on accident.
Seriously though, Russia has shown itself to be congenitally incapable of getting its crap together in any meaningful manner and is always all about blaming someone else for its constant failure.
The Soviets never left the gov, they just reinvented themselves and continue to be just as incredibly incompetent as always.
I have tried to understand first the Russian mentality, then the Soviet, and now -once again- the Russian mentality.
I came across an article written by Theodore Dalrymple that described Russia’s “Alexis Tocqueville”, a nineteenth-century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine:
“Custine grasped that the propensity to deceive and to be (or to pretend to be) deceived lay at the heart of Russia’s evident malaise. The maintenance of despotism depended upon this universal vocation for untruth, because without the fiction that the despotism was necessary, that it conduced to the happiness and well-being of all, and that any alternative would be disastrous, the subject population would cease to be controllable. The inability to speak even the most evident truth perverted all human relationships and institutions. And of course the lie came to be the foundation of all twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, without which they could not survive. “The political system of Russia,” wrote Custine, “could not withstand twenty years of free communication with Western Europe.”
Mr. Custine, I believe, hit the nail on the head. You can find the lengthy piece at http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_urbanities-how_to_read.html.