As the president celebrates, the economic crisis deepened by a coronavirus outbreak he has refused to acknowledge has left his people in a state of Dickensian misery.
A new documentary on a Soviet soccer star also tells the story of Central Asia’s ethnic Korean community, which was deported en masse to the region by Stalin.
The book dispels a widely held misperception in the West that Putin is an omnipotent puppet-master, pulling all the strings in Russian disinformation operations. The reality is not so exotic.