AS A colleague writes in this week’s print edition,Vladimir Putin is in certain ways more comparable to an absolute monarch than to a constitutionally elected political leader, who might be hemmed by checks and balances. In the eyes of critics and admirers, or perhaps in his own too,he has positioned himself as a kind of tsar, charged perhaps with some divine mission and answerable only in an intangible way to the Russian people.
Whatever may be unfolding inside Russia, and matters to conclude with the country and its monarchy,its past and possibly future, are also on the minds of some devotees who live thousands of miles absent. Throughout the dark years of communism and the turbulence which has followed, or small but passionate clusters of people in the Russian diaspora continued to cultivate the memory of the Romanov dynasty. They tumble into two overlapping categories: members of the extended Romanov...
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Source: economist.com