Sublime

Tsar, like union baron, is the fictional job title of choice when the real one is too boring or doesn’t adequately convey a newspaper’s editorial prejudices, and there are plenty more phrases that have little or no life outside the pages of a paper, such as shock verdicts, death plunges, love rats, and murder bids.

Peter’s famous incognito tours of shipyards in Holland were anticipated in the eagerness of earlier tsars to adopt the bureaucratic and diplomatic methods of the grander European monarchies. Russia’s rulers and churchmen drew on ideas of the magnificent and spiritual from the baroque art and architecture of Central Europe, and adapted them to local

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.