The end of Russia as we know it

Russia's neighbors - and many nations still part of Russia itself - will not forget and may never forgive.

It recently occurred to me that if Vladmir Putin had dropped dead of a heart attack in 2007, he’d likely go down as the greatest leader in Russian history. Since the one who freed the serfs (and even that accomplishment had an asterisk next to it), at least.

Don’t get me wrong: his authoritarian instincts were there from the beginning. But after the stagnation of the seventies, decline of the eighties and chaos of the nineties, Russia under Putin’s leadership had become something resembling a functioning state by the late 2000s. (High oil prices certainly helped, with at least a little bit of the wealth trickling down to the masses after the yachts and Premier League clubs had been purchased.)

Even for a few years after the 2008 war in Georgia and Ukraine invasion 1.0 in 2014, Putin might still have gone down as one of better Russian rulers in recent…