1.   Anxious to sever its ties with the Soviet past, Latvia has ordered Russian-speakers to exchange their old Soviet passports for new non-resident documents.

2.   A lawless limbo between the Soviet past and a glittering but perilous future is the rule across the Caspian basin.

3.   But aside from a few Western stores that have popped up around the capital in a decade, the economy is mired in the Soviet past.

4.   But Russia has never fully grappled with its Soviet past.

5.   For, unfortunately, Russia has not made a clean break with its Soviet past.

6.   He cast the Primakov government as a throwback to the Soviet past and demanded that the Communist Party be banned.

7.   His films have been praised for their masterful performances, their keen observation of the Soviet past and their wry Chekhovian wit.

8.   In an echo of the Soviet past, taxpayers tend to see government as just a corrupt organization to be finessed.

9.   Indeed, the young generation of Russians born after the Cold War views the Soviet past like a fairy tale.

10.   Lithuania, like its neighboring Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, eagerly wishes to shed its Soviet past and be more like the West.