the number of layers an onion has depends on its species

 

-onion flower

  It has been posited that onion domes first appeared during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. 
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    Although the usual number of layers is between 8 to 13, the number of layers an onion has depends on its species.    https://study.com/academy/answer/how-many-layers-does-an-onion-have.html
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12-11-17  "At the time (~1982) I signed a confidentiality agreement," https://www.scribd.com/article/366939242/What-Putin-Really-Wants

Victor Minin, cyber security veteran, told me with a mischievous smile.  “Do you think anything has changed?"  

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2-17-19  Kazan’s Business-Gazeta surveyed eleven Russian and Tatar experts.  Maksim Kalashnikov, one of these, said:

Putinism consists in “the preservation of an economy based on the export of raw materials and stagnation in scientific-technical development, the shift of the economy in whatever way will support war and the enrichment of the elite, support for the security agencies as the core of the state, the destruction of courts and legislative bodies, and the promotion of feudalism which involves “first the degradation of the masses and then of the rulers.”  Even the ethnic Russians, the state-forming people, have been reduced to second-class citizens.  “Naturally there is no ideology of the future.”

http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/02/does-putinism-even-exist-experts.html

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  On 8-19-1991 in Moscow the veteran coup plotters seized immediate control of all airwaves and shut the presses in an attempt to appear in full command and make sure that the pride of a unified Soviet Union stood unshaken.

  But there was a communications loophole--one neither the KGB knew how to plug nor which Yeltsin had ever heard about.  And it involved a team of geeky technicians and a revolutionary Soviet e-mail system called RelCom.  The story of RelCom -- the Soviet Union's first private computer network and forerunner of what became known as the Internet -- begins in the bowels of the super-secret Kurchatov Institute on the dusty outskirts of Moscow.

  Its team of 10,000 nuclear scientists and math whizzes had orders to keep up with the West during the Cold War.  "Perhaps Yeltsin's decree (of August 19, 1991) reached one of our clients by fax -- we had them in those days -- and then they posted it with us.  But either way, Yeltsin's appeal to the people was one of the first things we published” -former RelCom manager Maria Stepanova.

  RelCom went on to open the floodgates and pass each of its posts to UseNet -- an onslaught of e-mails with titles such as "eyewitness account" that were echoed two decades later during the Twitter revolutions of the Arab world….Stepanova said she was driving out of Moscow and about to start her summer vacation when she ran into a column of Soviet tanks.

  She told her son that their vacation plans were finished and then re-joined the RelCom crew for a three-day spell in which they sent out tens of thousands of e-mails to information-starved readers across the world.  "We did not think that what we were doing was that important.  But we all really wanted to be a part of it," she said.  https://phys.org/news/2011-08-e-mail-yeltsin-outfox-coup-plot.html

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9-28-2016  MOSCOW — Soon after he was first appointed prime minister back in 1999 Vladimir Putin joked to an audience of top intelligence officers that a group of undercover spies, dispatched to infiltrate the government, was "successfully fulfilling its task.”

  It turns out Putin doesn’t do jokes.  Over Putin’s years in power, not just the Kremlin but almost every branch of the Russian state has been taken over by old KGB men like himself….(hence) a new super-agency called the Ministry of State Security — a report that, significantly, wasn't denied by the Kremlin or the FSB itself.

  The new agency, which revives the name of Stalin’s secret police between 1943 and 1953, will be as large and powerful as the old Soviet KGB, employing as many as 250,000 people.

  The creation of the new Ministry of State Security represents a "victory for the party of the Chekists,” said Moscow security analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, referring to the first Bolshevik secret police.  The important difference is that, at its core, the reshuffle marks Putin’s asserting his own personal authority over Russia’s security apparatus.

  Putin in 2004 said that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man”….“On the night of September 18 to 19 (2016) … the country went from authoritarian to totalitarian,” wrote former liberal Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov on his Facebook page.

  Further evidence of Putin’s gathering of power into his own hands is an ongoing purge launched over the summer that has already claimed the heads of the Federal Narcotics Service, Federal Protection Service (Putin’s bodyguard), the Federal Migration Service and Russian Railways, as well as the president’s Chief of Staff and personal confidant Sergei Ivanov.   The aim in all cases seems to be to replace old-guard Putin allies with younger, more loyal and less independent figures.  The same pattern has been repeated among regional governors—four of whom have recently been sacked, and two replaced by Putin’s personal bodyguards.   https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/