The Russians likely think the U.S. and Europe are trying to destroy Russia

Imagine you grew up in Russia and the news their filled your head up with how bad the U.S. was. Say you were my age 66, so you were 2 in 1950 like me. So, all your life the Soviet Union was fighting against the Imperialist U.S. and Europe and NATO. Then the unthinkable happened. Osama Bin Laden was given stinger missiles in Afghanistan and he and his Mujahadeen fighters started shooting down helicopters and jet fighters right and left and pretty soon the Soviet Union had to withdraw because all the shot down jet fighters and helicopters and manpower being lost was just too expensive to continue. Then another unthinkable thing happened, Chernobyl which blew up straight into the air into the atmosphere and radiated the whole world and Europe and England to the point where wild boar and sometimes deer cannot safely still be eaten in some places in Europe and Great Britain from Chernobyl.

With Chernobyl, the Soviet Union just finally collapsed financially. What were you to think in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron curtain was no more. What was Colonel Putin in East Germany to think when the Berlin Wall fell, then Poland and every other Eastern European Communist country one by one over the years.

Now, 25 years later Putin is no longer a KGB Colonel in East Germany but leads Russia. But, in their news Russians are very afraid of NATO in particular because they believe it's very existence is to end countries just like theirs.

And to some degree, the people in the U.S. (mostly now because of Putin) see Russia becoming more and more like it was from 1945 with Stalin to when Gorbachev freed up the Russian people once again and Yeltsin and then Putin became the leaders of Mother Russia.

So, if you were Russian today and my age, you very well might think that the main purpose of the U.S. was to bury all Russians with what Putin is telling you in the news. Because he controls all news outlets in Russia now and mostly western points of view are never really heard except through blogs like this one.

However, how Americans actually think is very different. Americans believe that all people should be free and we are sort of ethnocentric about our freedoms and want everyone to have the kinds of freedoms we do.

However, in Russia it is an entirely different culture and world history than ours here in the U.S. which comes down starting with the Magna Carta in England long ago. Russian History has a lot more long suffering people who were not given many rights ever. And mostly were just lucky to survive whatever happened in their lives for hundreds of years.

So, for Americans to think that Russians are going to just embrace western style democracy is foolish in the first place. AT most they would try to make it their own. However, even that is problematic because of the lack of human rights in Russian Society for over 1000 years in the first place.

So, how do we solve this problem of two cultures that don't understand each other really?