All the Ms. First of all, as a counter to the understandable pessimism about Russia at the moment, I look at some of the aspects of Moscow that still make me marvel, and consider how they offer signs of long-term (which really means post-Putin) hope for Russia as a whole.

And then after the break, we have mob murder, as the newly-opened case of the 2009 murder of old-school gangster Vyacheslav 'Yaponchik' Ivankov says something not just about the decline of the traditional criminal 'vory v zakone' but also how the Kremlin tries to manage the underworld balance of power. (I talk about this wider issue much more in my book The Vory)

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