Explaining the resurgence

It will be very easy for future historians to look back on modern Russia and determine that the road to its authoritarian resurgence was inevitable. That all the signs were there from its very inception. The now-obvious parallels with the Weimar Republic make the case all the clearer. In the now familiar parallel, a defeated empire is weakened and down on its knees, beset with an economic crisis and a break up of its former territory. A narrative then emerges that it was betrayed, stabbed in the back by weak internal elements, and needs to use territorial conquest to reclaim its natural global position.