Many of the remaining tribes soon submitted to the Russians, including the Abadzekhs on 20 November 1859.

In fact, Putin has nothing to offer Russians aside from his own vulgar, hackneyed rhetoric.

But the first step is to start to create conditions in the region that make living and working there attractive to Russians.

That might not be the worst scenario a country could face, but it is not the most pleasant prospect for Russians, given their deeply ingrained sense of their status as a great power.

Russian attitudes and laws on smoking have been incredibly lax when compared to the rest of Europe. Russians have been free to feed their nicotine addictions not only in bars, restaurants and cafes, but in schools, hospitals, many forms of public transport, government buildings and apartment complexes.

The only freedom Russians have left is to devise bitter jokes that tap the country s rich historical stores of political pathology. If they could export them, they would be as rich as Germans.

This would provide a platform to re establish trade, transport, and other links among former Soviet countries and thus capture regional markets for Russian products, guarantee Russian jobs, and re assert Russian political influence in its old neighborhood.

A month later, Putin reinforced this image of Russians as the morally superior victims of a cruel and uncompromising West. We are less pragmatic than other people, less calculating, he asserted, before adding that Russia s greatness and vast size means we have a more generous heart.