To Sarah: I would leave labels like “neo-liberalizer elite” on packing cases where they belong. In the context of a discussion labels do worse than clarify nothing; they obscure and confuse what they purport to clarify. They are a way of trying to explain without an explanation – things suddenly need no explanation, no clarification, no further analysis and are apparently unworthy worthy of defense once an anonymous someone or something called “the neo-liberalizer elite” (or “neocons” or “Nazis” or “Jews”, etc. etc.) has done it. Labelling closes the mind, it does not open it. As for the Baltics, yes, they have suffered in the global financial crisis, partly due to circumstances over which they have no control and partly due to their own policies. But you are quite wrong when you say their governments have “brought nothing but hardship to ordinary people.” They have brought freedom from foreign occupation and terror, freedom for their people to embrace their own culture and speak their own language in their own land, freedom of travel, association, and speech, freedom to run their own affairs, to join or not join their own alliances, freedom to be who they are, freedom to make their own mistakes if need be. Those freedoms are absolutely priceless, as everyone who has ever suffered their loss will tell you. Even in the “best” Soviet years, the Baltics weren’t as well off as they are today in a world economic crisis, nor as secure. Back then people would have traded almost anything for the privilege of suffering today’s problems. There they had the “freedom” of national prison. Today they have the problems of free men and women. As for “blaming Russia on this,” I didn’t think that I had. However, in 1939 Estonia’s standard of living was similar to Finland’s. If not for the intervening Soviet occupation, Estonia’s economy would still be on a par with Scandinavia, and its experience of the global financial crisis would probably be no greater than theirs.