Imagine you are the President and one night you fall asleep and dream. You have spent the last twelve years doing hard labour making your country a better place (true, you took time out as PM, over the last four years, though you never stopped labouring away, you never once abdicated responsibility). You have built a perfect pyramid, a ‘vertical’ of power, you believe, as elegant and perfect and as strong as one of the Kremlin’s Towers. Things have been going better and better: everyone (well, everyone who counts) tells you so. [Read more]