What end of history?

Turkey shots down a Russian Sukhoi su-24 plane. 

And then, someone on the ground kills one of the pilots and a  soldier of the Russian rescue mission.

Russia gets angry, for obvious reasons, and the Nato has to congress and decide what to do.

Suddenly, we are at the dawn of a new "Cold War". Suddenly?

It is a situation "the West" has done much to create, ever since the '90s.

Back then, when the old SSSR collapsed, we had a chance to help what remained, Russia mostly, grow into some kind of democracy.

All it would have taken was to help the poor schmucks  get their economy back in line. A plan Marshall.

What they got was western multinationals trying to gobble up the few functioning parts of the old soviet system, with the help of many members of the old  bureaucratic mafia that strangled the Soviet, now anxious to reinvent themselves as capitalist oligarchs.

As a result, life got harder in Russia and its people came to suspect what we call democracy of being, really, just another great scam.

No different, in the end, than what had become the communism of the Soviets:  big words, great ideas, and you needed to be a "friend of friends" to get a car. 

Only, now you had to be an armed "friend of friends" to use it, as the pieces of the old apparatus turned full fledged mafia weren't above shooting each other (this, was more pronounced in other regions of the ex-empire, but something passed in Russia too).

In this state of affairs, Putin - a very product of the old Soviet Era, the former Rezident of KGB in East Berlin - was hailed as a much needed saviour.

The reincarnation, still in the making, of Stalin, Peter the Great, Ivan the terrible, Lenin, Stalin and many other autocrats that have made the history - and the terrible greatness - of Russia.

This, at least, is the opinion of a friend of mines that lived a couple of years in St. Petersburg and came back changed - by the experience - in a vehement supporter of Mr. Putin. 

He, too, doesn't believe that democracy is ever going to work in Russia and that a "Czar" is better than the anarchic cleptocracy the Russians seem prone to work themselves into, if left to their own devices.

Putin is also inching Russia back to its position as a regional power - a position that is in many ways inevitable, given its size, resources and location.

A position in which it has plenty of motives of friction with Europe - whose interests involve some of the areas that Russia historically considers his "backyard", the USA - its main competitor in the weapons export business , Japan - Kurili Islands, to name one point of contention,  and - to a much lesser extent, mainly for reasons of geography - China.

And it is not like Russia is the only modern power with misgivings about democracy. 

China is still rising, even with all the imponderables in its situation, and if its people seem to start realizing that democracy is not just another big occidental scam, its state doesn't look ready for anything more than some half-hearted lip service for quite still some years to come.

Most Islamic states and political forces, one way or another, seems to consider democracy a perversion. 

Even the occidental democracies themselves are not in their best democratic shape eve - wide spread mass surveillance, mounting inequalities, the effort of this or that right-wing government to reduce social mobility and economic woes. 

As time passes, "The End of History" seems farther and farther...

History, at best, took just a short beauty nap, to come back as gorgeous as ever.