Look up the word "Kremlinologist" and, shockingly, you won't see my picture next to the definition.

     Old joke, but you get my point.

     I'm just a guy--an old one, at that--who was five years old during the Cuban missile crisis.     I have vague recollections of my parents laughing nervously as they watched Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium at the U.N. General Assembly, and yelling, "We will bury you!"       

     Now THAT, my friends, was a Cold War.

     Much has changed, including the fall of the Soviet Union, but the question is now being asked in light of Russia's invasion of pro-Western Georgia: is this the start of a new Cold War?

      I'm not going to even PRETEND to have an answer.       Analysts tell of strained U.S. relations ever since Communism got swept out of Moscow in 1991.       The Kremlin doesn't like seeing it's former satellites and republics lining up to join NATO, which it still sees as a threat.     It certainly doesn't care for the U.S. deploying missiles all around, most recently in Poland.     It didn't care for our invasion of Iraq, which it took as unprecedented meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state.       There are some who think we sound like hypocrites when we knock what Vladimir Putin is doing in Georgia after what we did to Baghdad.   There's a school of thought that maintains Iraq is all about oil, and as there is a similar mindset about Russia's incursion into the two Georgian provinces which could be a thrust by the Kremlin to further control regional energy supplies.

      All I can add to the story is my experience 22 years ago in the Soviet Union.       As part of a people-to-people exchange with Radio Moscow, my partner at the time Bob Reitman and I were able to do a series of WKTI morning shows from the shadow of Red Square.    While the broadcasts purposely avoided politics, the topic was inevitably brought up during after-show conversations with the variety of officials and spokespeople we were able to meet.

       The consistent, crystallizing take that I got from virtually ever person we talked to was this: that the price the Soviet Union paid in World War II was huge.       A proud nation saw Nazi forces not only ignore their sovereign borders but come dangerously close to it's capitol.    The loss of life was enormous.       The Soviet people, from the most pampered Kremlin official to the lowliest peasant, was taught to never allow the country to be put in that position again.     

      Our visit happened as President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were talking about eliminating the nuclear arsenals of both nations--a deal that fell apart when Reagan wouldn't back down on his plan to develop a strategic defense initiative, better known as "Star Wars".        Our Soviet guests couldn't understand why Reagan wouldn't relent, and we didn't know why they perceived it as a threat (it was, after all, a "defense" initiative, one that the President even offered to SHARE with Gorbachev).       You don't understand, I remember one of them telling me.     World War II, he said, was something fought on Soviet soil with Soviet loss of life.    You don't realize, he told me, the feeling of having your nation in such a position since the war wasn't waged in the U.S.        You had sacrifices, he went on, but we had fighting within miles of Moscow.        That, he told me, must NEVER happen again.

       For Americans, World War II is something we visit for a semester in high school.      It comes alive when Ken Burns does a documentary, when Tom Hanks or Clint Eastwood do a movie.       It pops up in the news cycle when Tom Brokaw writes a book about it.       The memory fades a little more with each vet's funeral--those are stories that won't be told again, a fervor that won't be passed on.

      For the Russian people, I get the feeling that what I heard 22 years ago amounts to a language that  is taught generation to generation.        It may have different dialects, but the message is the same.      It doesn't get rekindled soley in pop culture because the fire still burns brightly as a part of every day life.

      That doesn't justify what Russia is doing in Georgia this month--I offer this up only as an insight, a clarification.     I was lucky enough to have had some unguarded moments with some of Soviet people more than two decades ago.       While much has changed, I get the feeling that the lectures I received those autumn nights in 1986 are still being told.      It's how the people--and their leaders--are wired.        The name may have changed, but the mission statement of the nation hasn't.       To them, global politics starts and ends with the phrase, "never again."