The book and film starring Ostap Bender, the fictional adventurer of the 1920s conceived by the writers Ilf and Petrov, remains popular in Russia to this day. In one of the chapters of the book, Bender exclaims “The West will help us!” That phrase, like many from this book, has become a part of the language. If we take a look at history, we can see a few examples in which the West has indeed helped Russia in hard times. And this history does not consist only of the fact of deliveries via lend-lease during World War II. Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда. Russia is going through hard times today: the Putin regime is leading the country in the opposite direction from democracy. There are no independent courts, decreasing freedom of speech, no free and fair elections, no political competition, and deficient freedom of entrepreneurship in the country… Everybody knows about this, everybody sees this… And nobody, besides a numerically small opposition, is reacting to this in any way.