Contrast the two devastating articles from the Washington Post with one from Nikolai Petro, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, in the Asia Times (only an obscure forum of that kind would publish views this weirdly pathological). It's far too long, boring and crazed to reprint, click through to have a gander. To sum him up, Petro's thesis is that "hostility toward Russia is rooted in a mental image" -- in other words, we are just imagining that Russia is dangerous, a thesis he himself admits "sounds simplistic and naive." In other words he's saying: "trust me, it's not, put your life in my hands. If it doesn't work out, don't worry, you'll get a really sincere apology from me as they lay you into your grave."

Petro is a card-carrying member of the Russophile cabal over at Intelligent.ru (though that nefarious outfit seems, we are happy to report, to be down at the moment), which LR has previously exposed for the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda sham it is.

A reader says this about Petro's credentials (in the article he's identifed as "the US State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under president George H W Bush") :

Another truly sad performance by the absent-minded professor. [Almost makes one] wonder how much the FSB is paying him to write this sort of nonsense? Probably a depressingly small amount. I'll bet it's nothing more than an occasional plane ticket and hotel room while he attends some phony "conference" where he gets to listen to suave "former" SVR officers expound on the subtle truths of "sovereign/managed democracy" and the bright future of "Russia - The Energy Superpower." Barf!

The credentials he gives himself at the end of the article is total made-up bulls**t according those who know him. [One minute he's an obscure academic,] next thing you know, he's "THE US State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under president George H W Bush". If you changed the word "the" to "a", and knew that "special assistant for policy" is the title the bureaucracy gives to its temp workers in lieu of salary, and that he only worked about 6 months at Main State and less than 2 mos in Moscow, you would have an accurate picture. In his "biography", from his website, he simply drops the article altogether (perhaps relying on his Russian ancestry for justification?):

"In 1989 and 1990, as an International Affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, I served as special assistant for policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the U.S. Department of State and as temporary political attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. While in the Soviet Union I monitored local elections in central Russia, Belarus, and Latvia."

The resume he posts (though not on his website) is basically accurate, and a lot more modest -- tellingly, it also available only as a cached document.