This issue’s cover focuses on Vladimir Putin. In Belarus, among scenes that recall the revolts of 1989, people are turning out in their hundreds of thousands after a blatantly rigged election. In the Russian city of Khabarovsk tens of thousands march week after week to protest against the arrest of the local governor and the imposition of Moscow’s rules. Mr Putin is rattled. Why else is Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption crusader and his greatest popular rival for the Russian presidency, lying poisoned in a Berlin hospital bed? Regimes that rule by fear, live in fear—the fear that one day the people will no longer tolerate their lies, thieving and brutality. They try to hang on with propaganda, persecution and patronage. But it looks increasingly as if Mr Putin is running out of tricks, and as if Alexander Lukashenko, his troublesome ally in Minsk, is running out of road. That is why, despite the Kremlin’s denials, they are falling back on the truncheon and the syringe. And it is why, as the protests roll on, they must be wondering how long state violence can keep them in power.