Russians today marked the 10th anniversary of when the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, winding up a three-day official visit to Greece, remained tight-lipped about the historical milestone, with no official commemoration of the anniversary.
Russian lawmakers captured the general mood in describing the fall of the Soviet block in negative terms, while conceding that it was now too late to turn back the clock.
The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and two other former Soviet republics signed a treaty on December 8, 1991, in Belarus's Belovezhskaya Pushcha officially dismantling the Communist-era union.
The deputy leader of the liberal Yabloko party, Sergei Ivanenko, described the Soviet Union's collapse as a tragedy.
But Ivanenko added that he fully shared the opinion of a political scientist who said that "whoever is not sorry about the Soviet Union's collapse has no heart, but whoever wants to restore it today is insane," ITAR-TASS reported.
"There can be no return to the past," he added.
However, the leader of the pro-Kremlin People's Deputies group, Gennady Raikov, said: "The collapse of the Soviet Union was unjustified, and it has brought no real benefits either to Russia or to the other former Soviet republics," he said.
Seventy-two percent of Russian citizens deplore the break-up of the Soviet Union, according to an opinion poll by the independent ROMIR centre quoted today by ITAR-TASS.
Only 10.4 percent approved of the events of December 8, 1991, while 13.4 percent said they were indifferent.
Around 58 percent of the 2,000 Russians polled believe the break-up of the Soviet Union could have been prevented, while a third said it was inevitable.
Forty-four percent blamed the Soviet leadership for the break-up of the union, with 17.2 percent saying the nationalist movements in the constituent republics were the real cause.
At a glance Russia has made remarkable progress in the 10 years since the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist, with individual freedom, democracy and a market economy apparently taking root.
But look closer and the picture is less rosy - a mixture of stagnation and decline - with nobody in Russia's political or economic elite seemingly able to halt the downward slide that hastened the Soviet defeat in the Cold War.
On the plus side, the first post-Soviet decade has witnessed the beginnings of independent life in many spheres, following the collapse of the Communist monopoly of power and its planned economy.
A failed putsch by Soviet hardliners in August 1991 signed the death warrant for an ailing Communist system that President Mikhail Gorbachev had already placed on the sick list with his "perestroika" (restructuring) initiative from 1985 onwards.
Freedom and free enterprise sprouted in the post-1991 hothouse atmosphere, with the collapse of totalitarian controls and a new generation of entrepreneurs acting as the shock troops of President Boris Yeltsin's blitz on the Soviet system.
The first wave of reforms brought hyperinflation and food shortages, and the ensuing chaos almost sparked a civil war after Yeltsin, in 1993, turned heavy artillery on the Russian parliament building, the scene of his heroic resistance to the August coup two years earlier.
But the dawn of democracy also saw many pro-Yeltsin reformers nurturing unrealistic hopes of an economic miracle that would have taken Russia's income per head above Spain's by 2010.
Devaluation, default and a banking collapse in August 1998 dispelled the mood of optimism, and prompted much hand-wringing in the United States, where Congress and the Clinton White House answered the question "Who lost Russia?" with a bout of fingerpointing.
Needless to say, reports of Russia's demise were premature -- and are now just a dim memory. For the first time since the end of the Communist era, Russia has a balanced budget, a trade surplus and vast reserves that send politicians and financial analysts into raptures.
President Vladimir Putin has taken much of the credit for the modest economic successes of the past two years, notwithstanding the unusually helpful conditions - and rocketing world oil prices - but even he recognises that Russia still lags behind its Soviet-era performance levels.
AFP