Context:

Tom reads a passage from this 1998 thriller novel set in early Yeltsin-era Russia. The passage describes a British historian expert in Soviet history attending a conference in Moscow, where a journalist named O'Brien compares Russia to the Weimar Republic, listing six parallels including loss of empire, lack of democratic tradition, border troubles, anti-Semitism, economic crash, and the potential rise of a Hitler-like figure. Tom and Dominic use this to frame their discussion of 1990s Russia.