Is it now the Russian century? . No.
Russia's rise from post-Soviet chaos into a leading world power in the past two decades. " - Sergey Lavrov
The Kremlin's top diplomat blamed recent tensions on the "categorical reluctance of the United States and its western allies to agree that the 500-year-long period of western domination in world affairs is coming to an end,"
Lavrov is getting his history and arithmetic wrong. Fifty years before the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution, (say 1867 and earlier), the Russian empire of Tzar Nicholas and his forebears were part and parcel of the socalled Western world, albeit voluntarily. Russia contributed to Western Civilization and freely accessed equipment (like railways) and ideas, music from the common pool. All the princes and princesses dutifully obtained their formal education in places like Vienna, Paris and London. Hence I don't understand where he got this notion of 500years of western dominance.
The Bolsheviks following the thesis of Karl Marx, Hegel(?), Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and others rose against modern capitalism wherever it may be found, including Russia. We already know who won that battle of ideas by the time the Berlin Wall fell. From Gobachev all the way down to the absolute despot Vladimir Putin, it's been all downhill. Nobody talks again about world communism which even China spells with a small c. World hegemony in an era of democratization of nuclear power is now dependent almost solely on economic clout. Russia is not even in the game. Lavrov and his boss Putin should just save us all that saber rattling. We have enough of that already from Kim Jung Un of North Korea. But for the fact that the world is fully aware of the cost of a stupid mistake, one could easily say that we are not impressed!
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