Historically, Western audience received mostly negative and pessimistic information about Russia, which during Cold War was perceived as “the Evil Empire”. Despite of major changes in Russia (including the demise of Communism and the end of the Cold War), the perception of Russia in the West is still largely pessimistic and negative, if only for different reasons – poverty, corruption, nationalism, incompetent leadership, etc. Although there are grounds for such a perception, it is not the whole story. Reality is a bit different. In fact, quite a bit.

In reality, ANY nation has both negative and positive features – dark and bright sides. Pessimists are those who think that the dark side is stronger than the bright side and that tomorrow will be worse than today (i.e. our world is changing for the worse). Optimists are those who think that the bright side is stronger than the dark side and that tomorrow will be better than today (i.e. our world is changing for the better).

Looking at the history of mankind (and individual nations) from time immemorial to present day one can not help noticing that the world is changing for the better, bright side is stronger than the dark one and that tomorrow is usually better than today. This process is not always evident and setbacks do occur, but the general trend is clearly optimistic.

This site is an attempt to show how this general philosophy applies to Russia and the most important areas of its life and development as a nation and a state – politics, economy, culture, science, health care, history, law, environment, education, etc. Some of these larger sections are broken down into subsections which contain both brief notes more detailed information on a particular topic (usually placed on a separate Web page).

In short, the objective of this site is to present credible evidence of positive and optimistic features of life in Russia and the positive and optimistic developments in Russia. You can find a more detailed presentation of the underlying philosophy of “The Russian Optimist” in the section “About this Site”.

Some of the articles on this site have been written by the developer of the site, although initially most of it comes from various mass-media sources – printed and electronic. Some of these articles are translations of articles published by Russian mass-media; others have been taken from Western mass-media.

Although this site does not pretend to be a daily electronic newspaper, we plan to update it daily (with possible exception of weekends). So please visit us as often as you can – more than likely you will find something new on each visit. We hope that this site will help you get a better understanding of the processes in Russia and, if your professional activities include Russia-related issues, make your decisions more effective and efficient. If you can read Russian, you can find a Russian version of this site (which is somewhat different as it caters to a different audience), at www.optimist.ru.

Thank you very much again for visiting our site.

Sincerely,

Oleg Cheremnykh, Editor-in-Chief and Producer