The uniqueness of its structure and of its political, social and historical destiny is one of Russia's features that few would feel inclined to challenge. However, when looking at it from the outside, almost from any point in Europe, Russia looks more like a conglomerate of contrasts, a collection of images similar, perhaps, to the ones Mussorgsky depicted in his suite for piano, and which Ravel later turned into his well known symphonic piece.

This is true for Romanians as well. Romania's collective spirit sees Russia as a land of origin of great creations, which the lovers of arts, from music and painting, to literature, theater, film and ballet, rightly consider to be a giant, a universal and immortal attraction. At the same time, for thousands of people and for their direct descendants, the country is also the area of absolute pain, of graves forgotten or never marked, of human lives violently ended in the infernal machinery of the gulags, of the forced dislocation of communities and of nationalization, resulting from the application of the "Stalinist solution" to the problem of the multicultural diversity, of political disputes, or of the integration of the "acquired" lands and countries, which turned Russia into the geo-political giant of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is also the Russia which lit up the altar of Science, with its famous mathematicians and physicists. Unavoidably, there is also the Russia raised under the mantle of the USSR, which, through a huge wave of brutality created the pseudo-scientific system capable of generating Homo Sovieticus, multiplied into millions of copies all across the European area ruled by Russia with an iron fist, after WW2; a historic variety of the one-dimensional man, hugely degraded compared to the rather grotesque strokes used by Zinovyev.

For most Romanians, regardless of whether they are politicians,