[...] the very function of the House of the People was [...] to make concrete the social inequality between the dictator's lowly vassals and the pomp… - John Sweeney

I say it to my Ukrainian friends again and again: there is another Russia. The problem is that the alternatives to Vladimir Putin are either dead or not very alive.

Tucker Carlson was at one time the most watched cable news presenter in the States until he was sacked from Fox News. [...] On 9 February, Carlson, now freelance, interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow. What you got was a sometimes surreal but most often extremely boring encounter in which the Russian president lectured the far-right American television personality on abstruse bits of Russian history that set out his junk case that Ukraine belonged to Russia. Putin talked rubbish but Carlson let him get away with it. [...] The interview lasted two hours but Carlson failed to mention the fate of Russia's most famous political prisoner once. Is it possible that Putin banked Carlson's lack of interest in Navalny and steeled him to have him murdered a week later? I believe it is. [...] I struggle with this. I struggle with how someone as fluent as Carlson could be so wittingly ignorant of the succession of people critical of Putin who have ended up dead. I struggle with knowing the torture Navalny suffered in the Russian gulag, that his lawyer was so shocked on seeing her client's face gone grey, but that Carlson, given a two-hour slot with the man responsible for the killings of so many, with the man ultimately responsible for creating Navalny's airless isolation cell, could not be bothered to mention his name.
It is as if Tucker Carlson is Moscow's creature.

Perhaps Red Horizons is a scissors-and-paste job by an unsung, CIA-approved ghostwriter. The raw material reads like translated of Pacepa's debriefing conversations held in Romanian with his CIA case officers immediately after he defected. Pacepa often quotes chunks of Ceausescu's old speeches, freely available from Romanian embassies and in Western libraries, as 'remembered convervations'; occasionally he even quotes the text of Romanian decrees as spouting out of Ceausescu's mouth.