Putin revives a quaint Soviet custom.

[$iljanus]

I wish Putin would bring back the USSR.

Yeah, in the good old USSR dissenting reporters usually stayed dead.

[Holman]

I wish Putin would bring back the USSR.

indeed.

The USSR never went away. Having failed at its bid for grand-scale totalitarian domination of Europe, it gradually fizzled into the oligarchical gangster-state we see today. All they changed was the flag.

That, and the recognition that racist nationalism offers a more powerful narrative than economic ideology. Witness how enthusiastically the POTUS is trying to imitate them.

[Smoove_B]

The wife was in on it:

Taken to a hospital after his wife, who was in on the plot, summoned an ambulance, he was first wheeled into an intensive care unit and pronounced dead, then taken to the morgue. It was only then that he stopped playing dead and began watching the tributes to him pour in on television.

And the twist:

However, in the absence of solid facts and real evidence about any plot to kill the dissident, Arkady Babchenko, somewhat implausible figures have emerged from the shadows, perhaps the most unlikely being the priest, who claimed he was hired to carry out the hit.

Oleksiy Tsimbalyuk, once a monk and a deacon in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church who used the clerical name Aristarkh, wrote on his Facebook page that he was the man who went to the authorities after being hired to kill Mr. Babchenko.