This from the Big issue in the North 16-22 May

Charlotte Hobson, author of The Vanishing Futurist was asked “Can you draw a line between Stalin and Putin?
And she replied

Varlam Shalamov, the great chronicler of Stalin’s gulag observed that it was the mindset of the common criminals that dominated the camps – and by extension the whole country. Amoral, brutal and primitive, this mentality terrorised and crushed the millions of ordinary citizens who passed through the camps as thoroughly as any physical hardship. Under Brezhnev it quietly spread and flourished; under Yeltsin it revealed itself; but under Putin it has found a new confidence.

Review of Vanishing Futurist in Grauniad.