ABSTRACT
It is more than ten years now since our country rid itself of the bolshevik totalitarian regime and seemingly embarked on the path of civilized democratic development. Considerable progress has been achieved in certain areas and I am far from belittling its importance. We enjoy freedom of speech (censorship is abolished), conscience (freedom to perform religious rites), and movement (people can go abroad without many formalities and the KGB's permission) as well as elected power (still imperfect but much better than the dummy Supreme Council). Disappointingly, almost all these changes lag far behind expectations. To begin with, censorship gave place to the unrestrained publication of all sort of nonsense and pseudoscientific materials [1] coupled with a reluctance by the mass media to refute many false views. There is a shocking social inequality and stratification. Suffice it to say that the income of 5% of the richest people is 100 times that of the poorest ones (30 and 3000 US dollars a month, respectively) [2]. Corruption is unbelievably widespread and there are no serious attempts to stop it (see, for instance, [3]).
