Putin’s menacing Russia just a little bit of history repeating

Like Stalin, Putin has nurtured a climate of fear and lawlessness, in which those who rally behind the Kremlin feel a duty to eliminate the leader’s opponents however they can, says Nina L Khrushcheva

IN HIS play Murder in the Cathedral, TS Eliot describes the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, as a silently ordered hit. The English king, Henry II, did not need to give a direct order; his knights knew what to do with somebody seen to be undermining the state.

Eliot may have set his play in 12th-century England, but he wrote it in 1935, barely two years after Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany.