What Will Russia Without Putin Look Like? Maybe This.

By Joy Neumeyer, The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2022, 1:00 a.m. ET 

image (not from below article) from, with the caption: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s bleak Russian tragedy LEVIATHAN 

Ms. Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe. 

Excerpt: 

Russia’s current condition — militarized, isolated, corrupt, dominated by the security services and hemorrhaging talent as hundreds of thousands flee abroad to escape service in a horrific war — is bleak. 

In hopes of an end to this grim reality, some wait expectantly for Vladimir Putin to leave office. To change the country, however, it is not enough for Mr. Putin to die or step down. Russia’s future leaders must dismantle and transform the structures over which he has presided for more than two decades. The challenge, to say the least, is daunting. ...

For now, with most of Russia’s population forced into quiescence while others lose their jobs or freedom for expressing dissent, the possibility of the country’s transformation appears remote. Change, however, can come when it’s least expected. In early 1917, a pessimistic Lenin lamented that he probably wouldn’t live to see the revolution; a few weeks later, the czar was overthrown. ...

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jb: This article reminds me of the famous verse by Dante re hell:

"lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate" 

"abandon all hope, ye who enter"