Uganda, Jan. 29 -- Among the modest and infrequent number of trips that 'yours truly' here has ever made outside this beautiful and hardship land of our birth, two of them were to the same distant country - one before and one after a spectacular and irreversible ideological turning-point in that country. And that was Russia, which I respectively visited in 1983 and 1998. As it turned out, my first trip was just eight years before, and my second trip just seven years after, the now historically quotable 1991 'Collapse of the Soviet Union'. At the opposite ends of those 15 years I saw, in microcosm, the Russia that then was and the Russia that now is.

My 1983 trip to Russia was strictly just a stop-over in Moscow, en route to the city of T...