Discussions, post-mortems, analysis, inflated egos, and all that jazz.

You're all discussing the Soviet Union, but I communicate with foreigners. And compared to our modest "please," there's a lot of subservience and groveling. For example:
"could you please,"
"would you like,"
and other things. In fact, almost every sentence in business correspondence with some "Soviet-style" entity contains this. Something like that.
They can't even say "no"; they have to say "yes, but..."