In 1921, the year before he founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Vladimir Lenin challenged his fellow Bolsheviks with a rhetorical question: "Who overtakes whom?" Josef Stalin preferred a starker version: "Who-whom?" Both saw politics as a deadly competition in which the winner takes all – war by other means.

So does Vladimir Putin. He looks back at the late 1980s and 1990s with bitterness. He sees the tumult of that period not just as the collapse of the Soviet Union, but a devastating blow to something far more precious: the Russian state. Under his regime another familiar question looms: "Who is to blame?"

New York Review of Books