Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

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A large part of my previous research job at the University of Manchester was the monitoring of news and other

programs on two major state-regulated Russian channels. I watched a lot of television during

those two years, especially the evening news broadcasts, a task that was both beguiling

and repelling, beguiling in the sense that after hours of watching, I could

be lulled into a sense that all was well in Russia.

Dmitri Medvedev may be playing Robin to Vladimir Putin's Batman, but here they were,

day after day, chairing meetings on budgets, security and policy, visiting farms, factories, hospitals and

universities, meeting with heads of state, government ministers, workers, students, medics and

shopkeepers, and mingling with ordinary people on the street who clustered around them with

their stories and their gratitude.

Yet, even as I describe it, I remember why it was also so repelling,

for the repetitive scenarios betray a predictable choreography of power and control.

Our focus as researchers was on how this Russian TV land represents issues of multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-confessional conflict and nation building in Russia, the nationalities issue,

or national nevapros.

So, as I watched those hours and hours of television, I collected and cataloged news stories that were

relevant to our research project, stories on religion, migration, crime, ongoing violence

...