Remember I celebrated my 10th birthday with my 4th class Soviet classmates in Kiev. ;0)

But the world we live in today makes the possibility of his requesting political asylym a bit more than the old Pravda's propaganda. Of course Putin is being disingenuous. But the stench of that dishonesty from him is, well to me at least, a bit softer than it would have been from Breshnev.

If I repeat myself, apologies, but the thing I remember most about news back then was that we lived in California at the time. The Tate murders (Charlie Manson's tribe) occurred when we were in the Soviet Union (I think Leningrad, but that might not be right). At any rate, Pravda printed the story on the front page and ran it for several days. But the Russians we talked to did not believe it. They told us, "You cannot believe such a thing happened. Such things never happen in America. You cannot believe anything you read in Pravda." They honestly believed that the Tate murders were a fiction that Pravda had written. So, even when Pravda printed pravda (the Truth) the people wouldn't believe it. This was stunning to me because I came from the country with the "free press" and my experiences living in Russia had taught me that my country's "free press" printed nothing but lies about the Soviet people and Americans believed every word. (My late father, who loved Russia and was fluent in the language, was fond of saying, "If you want to discredit the Soviet Union, you don't need to make things up. And if you do, you undercut your own credibility.")

I've known since I was 9 what the Soviet Constitution said and that the government of the Soviet Union paid little heed to it. But I've also known that our own government was not without flaw. The thing that's "new" today, imo, is how much like 1969's flavor of the USSR we have become.