| Summary/Abstract |
Between 1996 and 2011, I served as a consultant to the Kremlin [1], advising Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev [2]. And yet even I can hardly claim to understand the real mechanisms of power in today’s Russia [3]. In the past few years, the country has reached a level of dysfunction that has pushed it to the brink, threatening its very existence. Ill-conceived military adventures, poor decision-making, and political skullduggery—sometimes of the lethal variety—have wreaked havoc on Russia’s economy and led to international isolation.
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