The late communist regime is just familiar. The Czars before it were just as menacing, and justifiably so. Putin has tried to embrace all of it, Czarism as well as their Soviet past.
That is, were Putin a Czar, he would likely be behaving in exactly the same way. The German expression holds true: “Russia remains Russia.”
Exactly. A lot of people say that Putin was KGB, therefore he was a Communist.
The fact is, Putin is about power, it’s not about ideology, he would have served the Czar as faithfully as he did the Soviets had they still been in power.