Andrew Meier and Michael C. Moynihan are debating the whole Soviet thing over at the LA Times…

First, Russia remains a land of doublespeak. Listen to what Putin’s puppet president, 42-year-old former corporate lawyer Dimitri Medvedev, told the BBC this week: Russia’s invasion of Georgia was spurred by the “genocide” in South Ossetia. Even the most rabidly anti-Georgian reports by Russian state news outlets do not justify the claim. Then there was Medvedev’s paranoid aside that seemed lifted out of an old Soviet script: his claim that the U.S. is bootlegging caches of arms into Georgia: “What the Americans call humanitarian cargoes — of course, they are bringing in weapons,” he told the BBC. He added graciously, “We’re not trying to prevent it.” And then Putin continued the paranoid thread on CNN, claiming that “someone in the United States created this conflict to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates” running for president. Lord knows what Putin and Medvedev think Cindy McCain, who also dropped by Tbilisi this week, had hidden in her clutch purse. Second, Russia remains a land where the state is willing to enhance its power through the extrajudicial punishment — to the point of murder — of its own citizens.