Quote - holger, glad to know there were some soviet brushes there.
he earliest copyright date for photoshop AFAIK was 1989,
but unfortunately the soviets are reconstituting their union by absorbing
former satellite states on the border of russia.

that's right.
but imagine, that the USA would have been collapsed (maybe after another finance crash...) and only a fistfull of states would remain. the rest would be independent states with different governments and leading religions and so on. and after some years the remaining union would try to bring one by one these states again back in the union. many of the us-citizens would say "this is okay". it is not soo logn ago, the USA where divided into two big counterparts, clashing in a horrible civil war.
and today many russians say: yes, the other states of the former soviet union belong still to us. you can't clean all the years of the soviet-history. they had so many years no democracy and the soviet union was the other big player for so many years too, you cannot hope, that they are true democrats overnight and give up their dreams to be that important nation again.
wonder how the western part of my own nation could. without the marshall-plan, they surely could not. the soviets had no such help) .
I don't want to excuse the things the russian government is doing, but I just try to understand the motivation as good as I can.