History also teaches us that, despite their inertia, Russians are capable of turning on their government, as they did in 1917 and 1991. So when resettling comfortably in the Kremlin in 2012, Putin should take a moment to re-read Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, a novella about the bloody Cossack-led rebellion against Catherine the Great: “God save us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”