Norman Stone, in his recent history of Cold War, tells how British academic Phillip Windsor remarked upon seeing the fall of the Berlin Wall on the television that it was an end of an empire. When his companion asked whether he meant the Soviet one, he said no, political science. Having overlooked the signs of the imminent demise of the Soviet communism, and the recent spate of unrest in the Middle East (which, in a certain sense, is but a distant rumbling of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War), the mainstream punditry is about to miss the next big story – the confrontation of Russia with the West. There is a pronounced tendency to regard the current Russian regime as a temporary slow-down on the inexorable road to democracy, a regrettable, but necessary corrective of the Yeltsin’s era. The accepted assumption is that the best policy is to “engage” the Russian government, hoping that it would eventually be persuaded to change its ways and join the mainstream of Western democracies.