I've spent years wondering what went wrong. My colleagues who were right about this often just said: "Well, it's Russia." That's not good enough. An expert's job is not just to be right, it's to know why. /1
1. Putin was always this bad and people like me missed it; he was a cruise missile fired by the power ministries into the heart of Russian democracy.
2. Putin changed over time.
/2
/6x