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, 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 is 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.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

This is the BBC.

Hello and welcome to the arts and ideas download from the free thinking team at the BBC.

Chekhov and Dostoevsky in Siberia in the penal settlements.

The re-emergence of psychology in post-Soviet Russia, the nature of Vladimir Putin, authoritarian or totalitarian, religion

and the Russian people and state, just a few of the topics in this free thinking which is

devoted to Russia now and the ghosts of the Soviet Union and the Tsarist regime which haunted.

We begin with the New York-based Russian journalist

Masher Gessen, a biographer of Putin whose new book is The Future is History, How Totalitarianism

Re-Claimed Russia. Mascha Gessen tells the story of Russia from the 80s onwards, but also

interleaves through this history the experience of a number

of people, all of whose lives are shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union, by the disappointment

of the early 90s and by the rise of Putin. One is the daughter of the opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov,

murdered in Moscow. Another is a man who would

like to be Putin's ideologue. Usually journalistic books are written either about so-called

ordinary people who are assumed to have no power or about very powerful people. And so we see

the workings of a country either from the point of view of the people

to whom everything happens or from the point of view of the people who think they're making

everything happen. And I wanted to find people in sort of the middle distance. And so all of my

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