RUSSIA:President Putin's hopes of recovering respectability have gone, writes Conor Sweeneyin Moscow
It's 15 years since the Soviet Union was dissolved, but the recent murky spy tales have revived some of the the darkest memories of the cold war.
Three former Soviet republics are now full members of the EU, while the Russian Federation, which lay at the heart of the old USSR, has undergone its own radical economic transformation.
This year, with St Petersburg hosting the G8 Summit, President Vladimir Putin had hoped his reborn Russia would finally come of age again.
Buoyed by booming oil and gas revenues, its membership of the most advanced economies club was looking less like a bad joke than it had just a short while earlier.
Whatever concerns linger about the country's political direction, Russia has certainly cast off most communist shackles.
Elsewhere, the picture remains grim in countries like Belarus and Uzbekistan and, at best, mixed in others such as Ukraine and Georgia.
Mr Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, a view shared by about 70 per cent of his countrymen and women. In Baltic States like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania or across the rest of eastern Europe, it's at best a bad memory, certainly not something to remember fondly.
The current Kremlin administration has earned some praise for the economic turnaround of the country. The chaotic days of the 1990s, when pensions weren't paid and soldiers starved, are long gone, if not forgotten.
Now, the oil revenues are pouring in, literally leaving the Kremlin with more money than it knows what to do with.
So, as any prudent economist would advise, it's saving it for a rainy day, with more than €150 billion already set aside and the annual budget running a 9 per cent surplus. But while there are frequent traffic jams in central Moscow of bumper-to-bumper Porsche Cayennes, the average monthly salary nationwide stands at just €400.
Apart from the ostentatious 4x4s, the wealth has begun to trickle down, at least in Moscow and the other big cities, with the middle classes spreading daily.
Many Russians now take package holidays, while it's not just the super-rich who can go skiing, as the long queues outside the Austrian embassy here every day proves.
And when it comes to shopping centres, Russians have embraced them with zeal. Just last week the latest of many vast shopping malls opened in downtown Moscow - twice the size of the Dundrum shopping centre in Dublin.
Nevertheless, tales of a hard day at the sales rarely makes the headlines anywhere, but contract killings and radioactive poisoning will always suck up column inches.
So, the last three months have begun to steadily erode the benefit of the doubt Putin's regime had enjoyed as a country still in transition. First there was the murder of the respected deputy Central Bank governor, Andrei Lozlov, then there was the assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, before the macabre tale of Alexander Litvinenko had even begun.
Less reported, but just as awful, were the deaths in the past few weeks of another banker, the daytime killing by Chechen special forces of a former commander on a Moscow street, and this week, the death by heart attack of a diabetic Georgian woman, Manana Jabelia, in custody awaiting deportation.
Her tale is among the most poignant, as her family insist Ms Jabelia was legally in Russia and should not have been in a holding block at all.
So the good news about economic growth and future reforms have been drowned out by the bad. It's enough, suggest some Kremlin supporters, to indicate an anti-Russian conspiracy, pointing to the death of Litvinenko as the best example of a campaign to discredit the country's reputation.
It's unlikely anyone will ever firmly establish who was behind this murder, but it's certainly not doing Putin's domestic reputation any favours, insist many Russian commentators.
The editor of Russia's Profilmagazine, Georgy Bovt, pointed out this week that one thing his compatriots won't forgive is a leader who looks bad internationally, whether it was a drunken Boris Yeltsin conducting a Germany army band in the late 1990s or a decrepit Leonid Brezhnev more than a decade earlier.
Closer to Moscow, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which succeeded the Soviet Union, now appears almost as pointless as the British Commonwealth.
Georgia may still be a member, but its borders with Russia are now completely closed. Turkmenistan's president didn't even bother attending its most recent summit in Minsk.
One perk of CIS membership, cheap Gazprom fuel, will also dry up next year, with prices charged to countries such as Moldova raised to the same rate as Germany and Austria. Western Europe may rely on the world's largest natural reserves of gas continuing to flow west from Siberia, but it's a grudging dependance, not the kind of positive partnership Putin have hoped to leave after him.
Economically, the future for Russia may not be quite so glowing either, both the OECD and the World Bank are warning in the past few weeks, despite its current growth rate of 7 per cent annually.
For Putin, the hopes of recovering much of that former superpower respectability he seems to crave have gone.