If I had to choose the event in my adult lifetime with the greatest historical import it would be, hands down, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2005, then president of Russia Vladimir Putin was not exaggerating when he called it "the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century."
In 2007, another man who witnessed it wrote of the "profound traumas" caused by the fall of empire, but added that Russia "emerges anew on the world arena as a powerful key-player in politics and economics."
That other person is none other than Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov, until last month the mayor of Russia's capital, Moscow, and himself a powerful key-player in world politics and economics. When, on Sept. 28, President Dmitry Medvedev, at 8 a.m. no less, issued his terse ukase "effective immediately" that Luzhkov was being relieved of his duties as mayor "in connection with the loss of trust (in him) by the president of the Russian Federation," I was overwhelmed by an intense deja vu moment, accompanied by loud strains of the 1968 Beatles' song "Back in the U.S.S.R." assaulting my neurons.