Whiny liberals and assorted sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome, this is your moment to learn.

After seven years of whining that America is an imperialist nation with no respect for civil liberties etc., see what a real imperialist police state looks like: Russia.

In June 2001, a hopeful President Bush, unaware that Sept. 11 would unravel the kinder, gentler world his father spoke of, met with Vladimir Putin.

“I looked the man in the eye,” he said of Putin afterward. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy, and we had a very good dialogue . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Turns out the man doesn’t have one.

At that moment the former KGB colonel already was plotting the reacquisition of the lost provinces of the evil empire.

In his annual address to parliament in 2005, Putin made the grotesque claim that the “demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest political catastrophe of the century,” demonstrating a nostalgia for what he considers the good old days that explained his decision to reinstate the old Soviet national anthem and military flag.

When Bush observed the 60th anniversary of VE Day with Putin in Moscow, the Russian leader refused to acknowledge, much less apologize, for Soviet complicity in making World War II happen in the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

Putin also maintains the fiction that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia “invited” the Soviets in, just as he offers a new fiction that Russia was merely responding to Georgian aggression in South Ossetia.

“Stalin was a tyrant whom many call a criminal,” Putin says, “but he wasn’t a Nazi.” Oh.

These are words to ponder as Russian tanks roll toward Gori, birthplace of Stalin, Putin’s hero.

The Russia of Putin has been the No. 1 supplier of weapons to America’s enemies.

In December 2005, Russia announced it would send Iran $700 million worth of TOR-M1 (SA-15) short-range surface-to-air missiles.

They will be part of a national air defense system designed to protect Iranian facilities feverishly working on a nuclear weapon to use against Israel. Moscow has supplied the fuel for the nuclear reactor Iran has built at Bushehr.