Ikea has arrived in Moscow. So has a tight-lipped 47-year-old KGB staffer, with clear blue eyes and authoritarian tendencies strong enough to bomb one of Russia’s republics back into the middle ages…Now a man like Vladimir Putin has arrived to remind the IMF just how far the dark continent has slipped back into the Tsarist 19th century.

David Hearst, How Russia was lost, The Guardian, 27 March 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/27/russia.comment1