Monday, June 7, 2004; Page A01
MOSCOW, June 6 -- Andrei Zorin was practicing his English that memorable day back in 1983, listening to the forbidden BBC World Service on the shortwave radio when President Ronald Reagan made his declaration that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" that must be defeated.
Zorin, a dissident-minded literary scholar, was so stunned that he risked speaking openly on the telephone to his friends to tell them about Reagan's forceful words. "I jumped out of my chair and started calling," he recalled Sunday. "Of course, to us it was no surprise that the Soviet Union was such an empire, but the idea that somebody would say it from the podium, out loud, was a revelation."
For many Russians, Reagan was then, and remains today, a hero whose challenge to communism in the 1980s led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and inspired a generation of pro-democracy activists. "Walls are crushed by words," Zorin said.
But Russia under President Vladimir Putin is hardly the free society that Reagan once envisioned. Instead, it is a country deeply ambivalent about democracy, where many are nostalgic for its lost superpower status. Putin is a popular former KGB officer who has embraced Soviet symbols that Reagan sought to discredit, and Putin has all but eliminated opposition voices from the political scene. Recent surveys show that 70 percent or more of Russians regret the Soviet collapse that Reagan pursued so relentlessly -- a sentiment captured by Putin earlier this year when he called the empire's breakup "a national tragedy on an enormous scale."
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Putin stayed out of the debate Sunday, issuing no statement on Reagan's death.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20764-2004Jun6.html