The November/December 1991 issue of the New Left Review was the final issue before the fall of the Soviet Union. Communist Party hard-liners had staged an unsuccessful coup against premier Mikhail Gorbachev back in August. Boris Yeltsin, who would oversee Russia’s transition to capitalism, was now in charge, and a great many of the USSR’s member-republics had already declared their independence.

That issue contained an essay by the Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen called “The Future of a Disillusion.” Cohen took years working on and reworking his essays, and by the time it was published his prediction about impending Soviet collapse was a hair away from being entirely redundant. “It looks,” he wrote, “as if the Soviet Union, or the pieces that it may soon become, will embrace capitalism, or fall into a severe authoritarianism, or undergo both of those fates.”

As it happens, the third and bleakest option was closest to the truth. Vladimir Putin’s Russia may not be “severely” authoritarian compared to the darkest chapters of Soviet history, but it combines a brutally illiberal regime with a gangster-ish capitalism in which a handful of oligarchs hoard the country’s wealth.