The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.

Absent that brief ill-conceived stint at empire under Mussolini, sure. But the roadways and the ports and the political connections and the religious iconography that centered Rome within the ancient world continue to persist. It isn’t the center of a sprawling intercontinental kingdom, but it holds a privileged place within the modern sprawling intercontinental kingdom of NATO.

Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.

Russia’s in a peculiar place precisely because brain drain and privatization and punitive sanctions and the latest round of pointless horrifying bloodshed has sapped it of so many talented and driven young people. But the dictatorship - the bourgeois dictatorship, anyway - came under Yeltsin, following the Gorbachev coup. It brought in an entirely illegal dismantling of public industry and services, a looting of pensions and public reserves, and a fire sale of military hardware which set off a wave of ugly overseas wars in Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.

Only after the country had been hollowed out economically, by a cartel of untouchable oligarchs, did the public warm to the idea of a new singular strongman dictator. And the call for dictatorship was, at its heart, a plea for someone to drag the cartels back into line as part of a national project.

People have to play along in every system, because we’re not self-sustaining little monoids. We are hugely interdependent and most efficient when we are working together in concert as collaborative specialists. What we’re searching for is leadership. But all we seem to be offered is different flavors of oligarchy or autocracy.

The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.

That’s because its called Vatican City now.