To MEJanssen: you refer to Soviet statistics. Do you know of any that are actually reliable?? Of course corruption is a worldwide phenomenon; I have never said it wasn’t. But according to both international surveys and comments by Russia’s own leaders, corruption exists on a scale in Russia that is not generally duplicated in the West. Western corruption has causes that relate to the history of the West. Russian corruption has causes that relate to the history of Russia. It would be totally unrealistic to claim otherwise. And entirely naïve to assume that the three generations-long terror enforced, ideology based and paranoia driven socially, intellectually and physically isolated experiment in societal engineering that was the Soviet Union could simply end with no lingering social damage being carried by the survivors.

MEJanssen, You are quite correct, corruption is a worldwide problem and arguments about the Soviet Union are unconvincing, because they are not based on actual knowledge of living in the system. Deaths due to fire were lower in the Soviet Union than they were in the US. in the 60's 70's and 80's. Indeed the US could only dream of the good statistics the Soviet Union had, they were working hard and their figures were falling, whilst ours rising. In the end the US did get to the same figures in about 1990 (interesting date) but then Russia's fire statistics took off in the shape of a hockey stick. Now think what happened at that time, well it was the adoption of western mindset , western ways of doing things, Russia became the wild west, with all the ensuing casualtioes. No the simple truth is that adopting western practices and the collapse of Soviet control, was the reason behind a spiralling poor fire safety record. At that time people stopped quaking in their boots when they did something wrong and instead opened and stuffed their wallet, taking on free enterprise in everything, including standardisation and regulation. In the 90s I could buy anything, because that was the collapse that the Soviet Union went through, and believe me it was a total collapse of law and order, was it Soviet no, was it western style without control, yes. The government knows this and that is why they are returning to more and more control, call it what you wish, a return to Soviet control, instigating normal controls in a given free market. But that is what is needed, and is going to happen. The legacy of the free for all, is the root cause for the problems we have now, which is devouring our people. It was also the cause of the historical bad US fire figures, which the US has done a great job in bringing down over the years. We are doing the same now, introducing strict regulation and standardisation, which we had before. Ideed numbers have been dropping year on year.