The following words are from David Remnick, current editor of the New Yorker (July 1998 - ), in introducing a staff writer's reporting of the recent Wagner Group uprising against Vladimir Putin:
"Moscow has been a site of political intrigue since the days of tsars and of General Secretaries. As a young reporter living in the city during the Mikhail Gorbachev years, I would hear rumors of Kremlin rivalries and battles about as often as I would hear rumors of snow. And, sometimes, the most harrowing intimation of conflict came true. In August, 1991, the leaders of the K.G.B., the military, and the Communist Party plotted to lock Gorbachev and his family up in his summer dacha on the Black Sea; then they sent tanks into the capital. The coup started out as an ominous conspiracy, complete with resistance in the streets and a stolen nuclear “football.” But it all ended in just three days, a Marx Brothers farce.
"For a generation, Vladimir Putin has presented himself to Russia as a steely and imperial master of his realm. The fortune of every institution and oligarch depended on him; no one would dare challenge his authority. Dissidents were ruthlessly suppressed, exiled, sent off to languish in prison, sometimes murdered by nameless assailants. Putin could not be challenged."
PUTIN COULD NOT BE CHALLENGED!
Could the same be said of Xi Jinping?
