Putin's Russia, Tolkien's Mordor: What's the Difference?

I was rendered temporarily speechless by the news that a design company was planning to light up an enormous Eye of Sauron over a Moscow skyscraper this week. Though the project was ostensibly meant to mark the premiere of the third part of director Peter Jackson's ambitious Hobbit trilogy, it was impossible to ignore the symbolism of the evil all-seeing eye imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien watching over President Vladimir Putin's capital.

The stunt was canceled yesterday, however, one day before its intended unveiling -- one might say, precisely because today's Moscow is a lot like Barad-dur, Sauron's tyrannous seat of power in Tolkien's epic.