President Vladimir Putin of Russia has exploited the power of nationalism with particular effectiveness. I think the West never fully appreciated the magnitude of Russians’ humiliation over the collapse of the Soviet Union, perhaps because many foreigners didn’t grasp that it also represented the end of the nearly four-century-old Russian Empire. The domain ruled from Moscow shrank to the size of Russia prior to the reign of Empress Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, and its population fell from nearly 300 million to 140 million. The 1990s were a period of great economic distress
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