Their story has to be a frightening one, since the Ribbentrop- Molotov treaty and subsequent invasion of Poland/Russia by the nazis, and the prior “agreement” about the Polish state. The entire story of the Polish duchys and the destruction of the Polish officers by Stalin. The Russians are, first and foremost always liars. And they telegraph their fears, upon which they take action— like the shoot down of KAL 007. Xenophobic, the only way Putin can rule is to have an outside foreign enemy— to rouse the Stalinists and totalitarian/junta ruling groups. Freedom is dead more and more in Russia— and maybe that’s what they always intended, like a 10 year plan then back to the same old same old.
According to Anatoliy Golitstn, a KGB defector, that was exactly the plan. A false liberalization in the Soviet Union while the underground soviet system remains in place, later to re-emerge. Interesting you used the phrase "same old same old," Golitsyn's book was titled "New Lies for Old."
During the last few years of the reign of Czar Nicholas II, attention was being paid to southern Siberia, that swath traced out by the Trans-Siberian railway. His Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin, was a proponent of offering incentives for groups of eastern Europeans to move to southern Siberia to farm, to occupy the land and raise the economic level there. Relatives of my Grandfather took part in this movement and emigrated to the Irkutsk region in 1910.