From a New York Times column by Serge Schmemann headlined “Things in Russia Aren’t as Bad as the Bad Old Soviet Days. They’re Worse.”:

It has become commonplace to perceive Vladimir Putin as reverting to Soviet ways. So it seemed natural, shortly after the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia, that when I ran into a woman I’d known in Moscow back in the Soviet days, I lamented that things were more and more as they had been in those bad old days.

“No,” she said, “they’re worse.”