Of
Nicholas Piper
Helmut Schmidt called the Soviet Union an “Upper Volta with nuclear missiles” in the 1970s. The sentence, which has been repeatedly quoted since then, expressed the astonishment that the socialist world power was able to build a fearsome military machine, but at the same time remained underdeveloped internally, almost like a destitute African state. Similarly, today, three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one could speak of Russia as a highly armed Burkina Faso (as Upper Volta is called today). Russia can threaten with the most modern nuclear weapons, but has only a weak, corrupt domestic economy, which offers the population a standard of living well below the average of the OECD countries. Society and culture suffer from the repression, freedom of expression has practically been abolished, opponents of the regime must expect to be poisoned.