Mainly rubbish.

No Russian today regrets the countless millions of his or her countrymen that were lost building Saint Petersburg in the 1700’s or modernizing Russia under Stalin in mid-20th century. The scope of the loss is debated, the principle is not.

Oh, I am crying already in a deep regret, bring fucking plow back instead of the Stalin's industrialisation (I am ready to defeat the incredible, unprecedented war-mashine created by Hitler, won't fucking give up in a month like France or in a day like Denmark) and bring also back the swamps of "before SPb", they were so much nicer than "this bloody SPb on the bones"!

An advise to any lunatics writting such and alike rubbish: rise above being-insect that sees 0.5 sm. in front of its nose, view the whole picture when you reason about such a country like Russia for the whole 1000 years covering 1/10 of this earth or so, hence physically impossible to be reviewed in some lunatic vacuum independently from the processes going on in this world.

The founding fathers grew up with Louis the 14th as the Sun King of France declaring “I am France”. To Louis, the idea that his job was to act in defense of the individual liberties of Frenchmen

The key-word is "Frenchmen" here. Those fucking "Founding Fathers" erased so many slaves of color, not even counting them just like dogs, that Stalin together with Peter the Great couldn't possibly imagine!

Putting it shortly: "vacuum" works in physics, not in humanitarian fields, the more so as history neither needs any regret nor can't any lessons be extracted from there if judging it from the current point of view, completely discarding all the factors of that precise time, circumstances and conditions under which it all happened.