War in the Caucasus - Russia uses terror as it did before

IT’S BEEN 40 years since the Soviet Union’s old Cold War armies cracked down so emphatically and violently on Czechoslovakia, sending tanks to crush unarmed civilians marching on the streets of Prague.

Twelve years earlier — 1956 — they crushed the by-now-realised dreams of independence and democracy in Hungary. Eight years earlier the Soviets brought the world to the edge of war by blockading Berlin.

These interventions were not so much showing the steel in the velvet glove as revealing the reality behind a barely worn mask, a reality that for a considerable period in the second half of the last century justified Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire description.