“New Oprichnina” Revisited
From an article by Ion Pacepa in today’s NRO:
The Russians enjoy greater freedom than ever before in the long history of that autocratic empire. But after 2000, when former KGB officers took over the Kremlin, Russia started slipping back into her traditional samoderzhaviye, a form of autocracy traceable to the 14th century’s Ivan the Terrible, in which a feudal lord ruled the country with the help of his personal political police.
