Anne Applebaum has argued Putin’s methods were well-known totalitarian ones. He was replicating what Stalin’s forces did in occupied Poland, the Baltic states, and the rest of Central Europe in 1939, as well in 1944 and 1945. It was an “eerily precise repeat of the NKVD [Soviet secret police] and Red Army’s behavior,” she told me. Arrests, murders, ethnic cleansing, the shutdown of noncommunist parties and free media…all took place in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and other zones under Soviet control. Speaking of today’s Moscow, she said, “They have lists of people to arrest—mayors, museum
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