And where are NATO and the EU in all of this?

Filmed before Russia's President Putin attacked neighboring Ukraine, this film looks at what has happened since the dissolution of the USSR. Each of the 15 countries between the Baltic Sea and the Pamir Mountains seems to have gone its own way. 
 

The forerunner for independence was little Lithuania. Ruslanas Baranovas from Vilnius knows the Soviet era only from history books. He is politically active and works in the Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament. As in the other Baltic republics, Lithuania’s parliamentary democracy functions along western European lines. 

In Central Asia, on the other hand, former party functionaries have morphed into autocratic leaders. Despite these massive differences, Ruslan Semyonovich Grinberg, a renowned economist and Gorbachev confidant, believes that all USSR successor states act according to the same principle: striving for maximum economic cooperation with Russia, while trying to maintain minimum political dependence. 

Russia's Putin has called the disintegration of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." This even though it was a largely peaceful transition. The documentary looks at Putin’s Soviet nostalgia, as well as at the harsh political conditions he is imposing in his own country. It also examines what has become of the legacy of a world power in Lithuania, in the Caucasus, in Kyrgyzstan and in Russia.

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